QUINCHOPEL’s roof beam, staircase geometry and dining table were all recovered from Opelmec’s own past electromechanical job sites, turning company scrap into the architecture that houses it. Designed by Valentín Brügger for Opelmec, an electromechanical works company in Córdoba, Argentina, the 46-square-metre (495 sq ft) quincho — a social pavilion for grilling and gathering — sits stacked directly above the company’s own offices and warehouse. The building doesn’t hide its origins so much as build them into its structure.
The site itself sets the terms. QUINCHOPEL sits on a side street just off Av. Sabattini, in an elevated, mixed-use pocket of eastern Córdoba, Argentina, where houses, warehouses and productive structures share the same blocks. From there, the pavilion opens onto views across the city rather than screening them out.
The intervention overlaps the existing building rather than replacing any of it. The hall sits directly above the offices, occupying a former technical room; the kitchen, half a level above, cantilevers out over the warehouse shed below. It rests on a reused truss beam, recovered from a previous Valentín Brügger project — the same instinct behind the salvaged fireplace anchoring Sarah Jacoby’s Red House renovation in Brooklyn, where material is carried forward rather than discarded. The beam is deliberately separated from the roof so its suspended condition stays visible rather than hidden behind a ceiling.
Existing walls stay as found, inside and out on the terrace — rough exposed plaster, worn and stained, left set directly against the new white surfaces added around it. Nothing here is patched to look new.
The organization runs on two layers. Facade modulation acts as a regulating trace for solids, voids and structure, while two roof levels carry the program: the hall as an open arrival point from the offices below, and above it, the kitchen, grill, bathroom and terrace.
A site-line diagonal, present at the building’s edge but not carried into the new volume, produces a triangular piece projecting over the sidewalk. Its underside, an opal acrylic canopy, lights the entrance below. That same diagonal reappears twice more inside — first as the staircase, arriving on an angle as it cuts through the quincho and connects both levels, with a horizontal window at eye level acting as a lens onto downtown Córdoba and the hills beyond.
The second diagonal is the grill, treated as a solid core: on one side it sets the kitchen’s limit, on the other it contains the bathroom, its concealed sliding door running along the same angled line.
The kitchen leans against the south wall and opens north through a three-part glazed facade — two operable panels onto the terrace, one fixed pane cantilevering over the shed and exposing the tension element that makes the overhang structurally possible. A continuous awning opens or closes the whole facade, regulating sun and rain. The dining table follows the same logic: an irregular geometry dictated by the diagonal, built from reused galvanized structural and gas pipes pulled directly from the company’s own past works.
The real test of QUINCHOPEL’s reuse logic isn’t the visible truss beam or the salvaged pipes — both photograph well and read easily as gesture. It’s whether a method built on one company’s surplus material scales to a client without a warehouse full of scrap to draw from, a question TYPE’s radical reuse at Purbeck Cottage raises at a very different scale, and one this small, specific pavilion doesn’t have to answer.
QUINCHOPEL by Valentín Brügger | Location: Córdoba, Argentina — Year: 2025 — Key materials: reclaimed steel truss, galvanized structural and gas pipes, existing masonry, opal acrylic