Completed in 1937 on Pasaje Tres Sargentos in Buenos Aires, Ateliers Tres Sargentos 422 is a compact rental building that joined domestic life to artistic production through double-height rooms, mezzanines, and carefully compressed service spaces. Designed by Sanchez, Lagos y de la Torre, it remains a precise example of how Argentine modernism tested new forms of collective housing at the atelier scale. Today, the building is home to Bureau, a new cultural strategy office opening this October, extending the atelier’s legacy of creative work into the present.

Ateliers Tres Sargentos 422 Technical Information

• ArchitectsSanchez, Lagos y de la Torre
• LocationTres Sargentos 422, Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Project Years1937 – 1937
• Photographs© Javier Agustín Rojas

The atelier was not an addition to the apartment. It was part of the program from the outset.

– Sanchez, Lagos y de la Torre

Modern Housing and the Atelier Type in 1930s Buenos Aires

Ateliers Tres Sargentos 422 belongs to a decisive period in Buenos Aires architecture, when modern planning principles began to alter both the skyline and the internal organization of housing. The Kavanagh Building, completed in 1936 by the same office, made this transformation legible at metropolitan scale through its height, massing, and urban presence. Ateliers Tres Sargentos operated through a more concentrated architectural question: how might a rental dwelling accommodate productive work without treating it as a secondary or improvised function?

Set within the narrow fabric of Retiro, the building translates aspects of European modernism into a constrained urban frontage. Its white rendered facade is organized as a planar composition of horizontal steel-framed windows, a slim continuous railing, and a recessed ground-floor entrance protected by a cantilevered canopy. Ornament is largely eliminated in favor of proportion, shadow, and constructional detail. Glass blocks and perforated concrete ventilation screens at the lower level mediate between the street and the more enclosed spaces within.

The building’s importance lies less in stylistic reduction than in the program carried behind the facade. Sanchez, Lagos y de la Torre conceived the units as homes for people whose professional and creative activity required spatial generosity, daylight, and a degree of separation from domestic routines. The atelier therefore became a constituent part of collective housing, introducing a vertical and sectional complexity absent from the conventional apartment plan.

Living and Working Within the Duplex Atelier

The atelier type reorganizes the home’s hierarchy. Rather than spreading rooms across a uniform floor plate, the duplex units concentrate volume where work is expected. Double-height spaces receive daylight through large street-facing windows, while mezzanines, compact kitchens, bathrooms, storage, and more private areas occupy the lower zones beside or beneath the elevated platform. The result is not simply a larger living room, but a domestic section calibrated around varying degrees of enclosure and exposure.

Historic photographs show this sectional logic clearly. A tall central room is framed by the mezzanine’s solid parapet, while a more compressed alcove behind it accommodates service functions. Curtains could soften or temporarily separate these zones, yet the principal volume remained visually continuous. This arrangement allowed the studio to function as a place of work, reception, display, and dwelling, resisting the strict functional separation often associated with modern domestic planning.

The plans of 422 reveal repeated units organized around a central circulation and light well, with short internal stairs leading to upper levels. The neighboring building at Tres Sargentos 436 extended the model through twelve duplex ateliers, incorporating terraces, mezzanines, and larger studio volumes. Together, the two buildings treat vertical section as an instrument of flexibility: collective housing provides the framework, while each resident can define the relation between production, privacy, and daily occupation.

Tres Sargentos as a Node of Argentine Modern Culture

Tres Sargentos’ architectural significance was reinforced by its inhabitants. In 1938, Antonio Bonet lived and worked at number 436 after arriving in Buenos Aires from Europe, where he had worked with Josep Lluis Sert, Josep Torres Clave, and Le Corbusier. The building became one of the settings in which Bonet, Juan Kurchan, Jorge Ferrari Hardoy, and other young architects began to gather around the ideas that would inform Grupo Austral.

These associations situate the duplex atelier within a wider debate about modern architecture in Argentina. The model was not limited to providing a spacious apartment for an individual artist. It established an architectural framework in which creative work could become visible within the rhythms of domestic life and near other practitioners. Bonet, Ricardo Vera Barros, and Abel Lopez Chas later developed a related proposition in Casa de Estudios para Artistas, where seven duplex studios combined double-height workspaces, terraces, and living quarters in a more explicitly collective arrangement.

Pasaje Tres Sargentos thus became more than a minor residential street. Over several decades, housing, architectural offices, studios, and informal cultural meeting places accumulated within a tight urban setting. The later presence of Bar Bar O nearby extended this overlap between artistic discussion and everyday social life. Such concentrations complicate the image of modernism as an isolated formal language, showing instead how architectural form, professional networks, and cultural exchange could be embedded in an ordinary urban passage.

Preservation, Reoccupation, and the Contemporary Interior

The current occupation of Ateliers Tres Sargentos 422 by Bureau continues the building’s original association with cultural production, although its contemporary use differs from the domestic artist studios envisioned in 1937. The reoccupation is most effective where it preserves the spatial evidence of the original scheme rather than obscuring it. The double-height room, mezzanine structure, compact internal stair, and restricted service zones still establish the interior’s basic order.

Several elements retain the material character of the building’s modern construction. The original steel casement windows remain visible, including operable hardware and the ribbed glass-block panel below the principal opening. Their thin profiles preserve the tall aperture as an instrument for bringing diffuse light into the atelier. The fireplace, with its travertine surround, herringbone brick firebox, and hearth, adds another layer of domestic scale while maintaining a fixed anchor within the larger volume.

Later interventions use oak flooring, recessed storage, white plastered surfaces, and flush cabinetry to clarify rather than compete with the existing sectional arrangement. The oak handrail follows the stair as a continuous curved line, making circulation legible against the white mezzanine wall. At the upper level, compact kitchen equipment is concealed behind folding doors, keeping the mezzanine usable as a work or meeting area. Furniture such as the BKF chair also recalls the broader Argentine modern context, linking the room to the design culture that emerged around Bonet, Kurchan, Ferrari Hardoy, and Grupo Austral.

© Javier Agustín Rojas© Javier Agustín Rojas© Javier Agustín Rojas© Javier Agustín Rojas© Javier Agustín Rojas© Javier Agustín Rojas© Javier Agustín Rojas© Javier Agustín Rojas© Javier Agustín Rojas© Javier Agustín RojasAteliers tres sargentos© Sanchez, Lagos y de la Torre© Sanchez, Lagos y de la Torre© Sanchez, Lagos y de la TorreAbout Sanchez, Lagos y de la Torre

Sanchez, Lagos y de la Torre was a Buenos Aires architectural practice formed by Gregorio Luis Sanchez, Ernesto Lagos, and Luis Maria de la Torre. Active in 1937, the firm developed a less ornamental modern architecture that explored new approaches to floor-plan organization and the relationship between living and working spaces.

Credits and Additional Notes

1. Photography: Javier Agustin Rojas
2. Portrait photography: Lucia Bonells
3. Other contributors: Historic facade and interior photographs from the Ernesto Katzenstein Archive
4. Research references or publications: Plans and axonometric drawings from Sanchez, Lagos y de la Torre: Del eclecticismo al estilo moderno.
5. Current occupant: Bureau, cultural strategy office, bureaucultural.com | Instagram: @bureau_ba