The dictatorship, emigration, illness, immigration, recessions, and above all–her passing before I was born–have contributed to my unfamiliarity with my grandmother’s work and gave way to “forgetting” my family’s history and her built heritage in Argentina.

Signage in the construction site of Casa Melipal, Bariloche 1973, Hernandez Family Archive

March, 2020

Five years ago, after completing five years of architecture studies, my partner and I embarked on a much anticipated celebratory six-month trip around the Southern Hemisphere, with a few homecoming pit stops across Argentina. It had been over a decade since my last visit to the country, and almost three decades since I had been to Bariloche.

And so, in March 2020, I headed south to Patagonia for the first time since I was three, with the hope of seeing my mom’s childhood house.

Interior of Casa Melipal, Bariloche circa 1974, Hernandez Family Archiv

Project and management: Raquel Graciela Mochkofsky, arch.

General information Location: 3337 Lanín Street, San Carlos de Bariloche, Río Negro ProvinceLot area: 685 m²Covered area: first stage: 110 m²; second stage: 186 m²; future stage: 216 m²Year: Project: 1970. First stage: 1973; second stage: 1977.

The design of the house proved to be a case of a universal design system for housing organization […] that responds to different density situations and characteristics of the natural or urban environment. […] Its status as an experimental house was made possible by the fact that it was the architect's own home.

(Mochkofsky 1978, 43)

Upbringing

Raquel Graciela Mochkofsky was born on March 28, 1937, to a Jewish family in Córdoba, Argentina. Sharing an interest in the built environment with her father, a civil engineer, she studied architecture at the National University of Tucumán in northern Argentina, where she met Raúl Augusto Hernández, a recently graduated architect who would become her husband. By the time she graduated at 25, Graciela was already the mother of two daughters, with the youngest born shortly afterward.

During the mid-1960s, as the tensions between militant and guerrilla groups in Argentina grew, the city of Tucumán became an epicenter of escalating violence. Compelled by personal threats and prompted by a professional opportunity offered to Raúl, the family left Argentina in 1968 and relocated to Zurich, Switzerland. Unlike her husband, Graciela was unable to obtain a work permit, and her Argentine architecture license was not recognized abroad. Barred from practicing, she grew frustrated and struggled to adapt and fit in.

Bariloche, 2020

The house, designed and built by my grandmother, was one I had visited only as an infant. It was vaguely present in my life through family photos and stories, but I never possessed a personal memory or image of it. Perhaps it was the presumption of a shared language between us–or the potential of a common interest–that made the absence of its drawings feel like the missing piece in my puzzle. I therefore set out to retrieve whatever documents I could find in Bariloche’s municipal archive, so I might finally have an image of my own.

Barely a week after landing in Buenos Aires, I found myself stranded in the Andean town during what became a never-ending (and the world’s longest continuous) COVID-19 lockdown. Like millions around the world, my plans were not only put on hold, but rather completely dismantled.

Determined to make my cross-Atlantic confinement somewhat productive, I reached out to anyone who might be able to assist me in my efforts to physically access the house. And indeed, upon tricking my way out after nearly two months of quarantine, I almost made it to its doorstep, forced to maintain an arguably social distance from its locked front gate.

Photographs of Casa Melipal taken from Lanín street, Bariloche, 1973, Hernandez Family Archive

The terrain descends towards the north from the street level, corresponding to the lower slope of Cerro Otto, and allows a view of Lake Nahuel Huapi.

(Mochkofsky 1978, 43)