ARCHIKUBIK House H "in Sant Andreu de Llavaneras
As a pipe is a pipe, sometimes a house is a house. architecture is to make decisions, decisions of all kinds, with many references and of course, with dramatic consequences. But what if the range of decisions is very succinct? What happens when there are no major obstacles to jump, it is not necessary to maximalist approaches, there are no situations revulsive? since in our case is that a home sale. architects always want to do something else for which we charge. hospital care when you do a hotel, a hotel where a skyscraper, if you do order a school parking lot, etc..
Not here. When we commissioned this house after analyzing the site, program, geology, urban conditions, the aspirations of customers, it would not be honest to a farm or a museum. there was a house and made a home. It may seem paradoxical but in order that what is honesty premium over the ambition of the architect or client or both. The key is knowing when to be honest and if perverse, when crudely assume that the logic level of a project or when there is delivered to a logical extreme, where the architecture is a continuity or be a shock when you have to think big and small, when this house is designed from the small, almost negligible, designed to detail the space and not space to detail.
1 .- The house has no doors or hallways. The strategy is twofold: for one side to create a lobby-entry once you're in the feeling of being outside. This hall is the hub of the home runs, the only possible corridor. The other strategy is to place the area of parents in one volume and the daughter in another. In this way the house is formed from an ax "H". To raise the volume higher (kitchen-dining-room ground floor bedroom and bath-parents-in first floor office) and the lowest in the west (room, bathroom). These two volumes are related through the lobby. The result is that despite being a house very restrained in size, space and flows constantly feel that is much larger. no doors to close a visual, there is underutilized corridors, every square meter is optimized to use a regular and intense.
2 .- The relationship between interior and exterior is made through an airbag 60 cms. Map window and the front are different from those 60cms. This creates an intermediate space, indeterminate and interstitial between inside and outside. A kind of transparent airbag. The result is that the landscape garden environment enters the house narrowly framed. This "bag" of 60cms totally transforms the usual sense that we have to engage with the outside through a window. This intermediate space emphasizes the landscape as a framework emphasizes an artwork. Another consequence of this "unnecessary bulk" is the quality of light. There are a lot of light in this house but little sun light to bounce on the bulk of antepecho of the window provides a wide range of hues, shades of color. The light is no longer a source of clarity and indiscriminate acquires the role of "discoverer" of the space, "visible" space.
3 .- The provision of home H had a problem of privacy, not so much the privacy of their residents but required the same body architecture. The shape of the house to the outside too, too open, too obvious, and our house is of a timid, shy of that eloquence which only gets in the privacy in the distance. He had to distance, to filter and make it your evidence collection. We decided to first put the water from the pool as an extension of the west room of the body. This enables you to create a distance between the observer and the observed. the timid never let get too close, at least the first time. After virtually closed entrance to the courtyard of the house. relying on two walls in the manner of earmuffs placed two small porches metal at the same time protect from the sun harder, extending the "ritual" to enter the house. Instead of entering the house through the door you enter through an open but narrow, a place where both can have a party and sunbathe.
A pre-shaped space by a minimum decision.
This house is a house. without prejudice, without a-prioris, without wanting to be anything more than a house.
