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Near the El Durazno River in Villa Yacanto, Nicolás Oks places a small black timber pavilion among old stone walls, native trees, and mountain views, its pale timber interior lit from above by a central skylight.
On a slope near the El Durazno River in Villa Yacanto, Argentina, this 70-square-meter pavilion by Nicolás Oks sits inside a landscape already marked by stone. Low walls, built from irregular rocks and associated with the area’s Jesuit past, define the site before the new architecture appears. Beyond them, molle and espinillo trees filter the view toward the Sierras Grandes, with Champaquí Peak visible in the distance. Rather than clearing the setting into a blank plot, the project works with what was there: the wall, the trees, the uneven ground, and the sense of arrival through a rough enclosure.
The building is divided into two parts. A long black prism contains the practical rooms and forms the entrance, where a concrete slab rises from the terrain and narrows as it passes through an existing opening in the stone wall. From there, a short connecting passage leads to the main pavilion, an eighteen-sided timber volume that reads from the outside as a dark, faceted object among the rocks. Its exterior is clad in wood treated with the Shou Sugi Ban technique, giving the surface a charred black finish that sits well against the dry grasses, pale stone, and bare branches around it. The roof builds up in three stepped tiers and ends in a central skylight, a small circular cap that is visible from above and becomes the room’s main source of overhead light.
Inside, the project becomes clearer and more delicate. The dark exterior gives way to pale wood panels, exposed timber ribs, steel plates, bolts, and diagonal tension rods arranged in a steady rhythm around the perimeter. Low windows run between the structural members, keeping the stone wall close to the eye and the landscape just beyond reach. The pavilion is not large, but the geometry gives it a ceremonial scale: one central room, ringed by structure, open to the sky at its highest point. Photographed by Federico Cairoli, Pavilion in El Durazno is less a retreat from the landscape than a measured way of sitting inside it — a small black room between rocks, trees, river, and mountain.
