The project is a single-family building with partitioned walls, placed on a trapezoid shape plot on the edge of the historic area of the small town of Adsubia, dominated by a south facing orientation towards the main street, and on the north side towards a ravine and the view of the rest of the town.
The plot is marked by its own identity; since in the past it harboured an oil press, its typological character of “old warehouse” as well as its constructive vestiges still remain: a stone masonry wall of large proportions dominates the northern side and also extends to the west, continuing across adjoining plots, and thus knits together the consolidated tissue. The intervention in this wall will mean not only the reconstruction of the urban image, but also a recovery of the great sentimental value of a construction with such a local implication.
In this environment the new construction has been birthed, made up of a basement, a ground floor with access through the southern façade, a first floor and a flat roof. Responding to a defined-use program by the owner where the flexibility of spaces is a must, the dialogue between the inherited and the created, between the comprehension of the material heritage and the necessary contemporaneity is established.
The construction is presented as a home, mainly developed over the first floor, with a ground level, a garage, and a big warehouse or working area in the basement; it could also be seen as a guest or residents’ area on the first floor, an exhibition hall on the ground floor, and a big studio in the basement. The building configuration carries in its DNA the opportunity of adapting to very diverse situations.
The different storeys are configured as diaphanous spaces, alterable, marked by singular elements and of vertical connection: the great wall of stone masonry consolidates and embraces the new construction binding one storey with the other; the stairs act as a sculptural element, subtle, straight, and tenacious, which guide the movement through the house. On the last storey, a kitchen and a bathroom, integrated almost as pieces of fixed furniture but invisible, narrow the space; and the light passes through the building as an extra compositional element.
The whole house is sustained by four metal HEB pillars, above which rests a corrugated sheet metal slab, backed on the edge. These, joined by IPE beams, allow for the freeing up in the back north area of a double height space between the basement and the ground level, and create a terrace on the first level, whose transparent floor floods the whole building with light. The stairs, the same as the light, hang from the horizontal elements.
In this way, the new house integrates the landscape in the form of a view, as well as the culture in the form of constructive memories, but only lightly touches them, without invading or harassing them, and without creating a rigidity that could prevent this exchange from being cut off in future times.
