2xm / TDA

Curated by ArchDaily

Architects: TDA 
Year: 2016
Photographs:Federico Cairoli

Text description provided by the architects. An elderly mother decides to build two compact houses along with her daughter, upon her own recent state of widowhood, giving up the large-sized house in which the family used to live.

This project reflects on compactness. (This can be defined as the ratio between the usable space of buildings and the space occupied by the surface).

Typically the amount of square meters guarantees social position, the more square meters we built, the more socially accepted we were, she commented.

The passing of time is fast. Children migrate building new places and that home becomes a museum, dark and silent.

Fearing abandonment and especially oblivion, this proposal restates coexistence based on practicality but especially constituting a new concept of compact use of space.

Based on functional requirements and especially the qualification of space rather than quantifying square meters.

We define a load bearing structure in reinforced concrete (efficiency and low maintenance cost, as requested by the future user) that optimizes the occupation giving emphasis to the void.

An upper beam 25 meters long. 2 columns located in a 1 to 5 relation. A side wall.

This basic and combined structure builds 3 habitable blocks and 2 intermediate courtyards. Two overlapping houses 4 meters wide and 25 meters deep in a 12x30 meter plot.

The front block is suspended 7 meters, generating the garages on the ground floor. The central block (fully suspended) houses living room and kitchen. The rear block houses the suite of the mother, also catilevered. Upstairs the daughter's dwelling, with 3 bedrooms en suite and private living room.

All the blocks have intermediate light and ventilation courtyards. A house that occupies a minimum area of land, giving the possibility to enjoy the garden. The exterior image results from the interior spatial search. Structural abstraction and dignity, rich spatiality, controlled lighting and human scale.

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