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Civic Patio. Municipal Government Building
Civic Patio
Third Prize National Architectural Competition
Location: San Francisco, Córdoba, Argentina
Year: 2025
Associated Studio: Balsa Crosetto Piazzi
Project Team: Facundo Gonzáles Abad, Valentín Orazi Igea, Camilo Canepa, Facundo Barra
The intervention is located on a significant urban corner occupied by an early 20th-century police building, whose civic presence and constructive clarity
remain active within the contemporary city.
Rather than proposing demolition, the project is structured around three coordinated actions: repair, subtraction, and addition. The existing building is
preserved and refined, removing non-essential accretions while adapting its structure to new institutional requirements. A new architectural volume is
introduced through contrast rather than imitation, establishing a clear dialogue between different temporal, material, and technological conditions.
An intermediate spatial layer mediates between old and new, resolving structural transitions while enabling light, ventilation, and exterior terraces.
At the urban scale, the proposal redefines the ground floor as a permeable civic space, extending the public domain into the site and organizing access
around a central civic patio. The continuity of the existing boulevard paving reinforces this relationship, transforming the courtyard into an extension of the city.
Programmatic organization follows a gradient from public to more controlled uses, supported by a flexible exposed reinforced concrete structure that allows
future reconfiguration. Environmental performance is addressed through natural lighting, cross-ventilation, solar control elements, and rainwater collection systems.
The project proposes an architecture that operates through reuse, adaptation, and openness—one that does not seek to erase the existing city, but to recalibrate it,
enabling new forms of civic life while maintaining continuity with its urban memory.