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Architects: Sebastian Arquitectos
- Area: 90 m²
- Year: 2019
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Photographs:Irene Ruiz Bazán
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Lead Architects: Sergio Sebastián Franco, Pablo Sebastián Franco
Text description provided by the architects. This small house built in the second half of the last century belongs to the “Damán” group of housing units, declared an urban complex of interest. Thus, it is proposed to recover the type of housing to adapt it to our days, harboring a new life, a new user, new uses in accordance with the spirit of the time, although without losing the essence of its initial identity. This is an example of rehabilitation and regeneration intervention in social housing.
Based on the planned street layout, single-storey houses were built, like a very tight container, aligning itself to the public thoroughfare, fitting in between the party walls of the adjacent numbers and therefore leaving a rear space for a garden or corral. Before the intervention, it was clearly distributed in three practically tight bays perpendicular to the façade: the first contained the access, the bathroom, the kitchen and a gallery; the central one the living room and a bedroom; and in the third there was a place for two bedrooms with access from the living room, which acted as the centralizing element for circulation in the house.
The intervention is based on the initial structure of three bands but spatially reconfigures the continuity between them and their uses: the first bay contains the access, the kitchen area and the dining area that extends to the outside through a gallery- greenhouse and a stand that seeks to link the interior of the house with the rear garden, generating a space rich in visual and functional relationships both in the house and in the garden.
The second bay is intended entirely for the living room, functioning as the heart of the house, complemented by a multitude of visual relationships with the rest of the rooms, which, far from being compartmentalized and isolated, are spatially integrated into it. The screening of the new metal structure that removes the original walls allows the game with filters that integrate or separate the spaces depending on the use that is assigned at any time to the room.
Finally, in the third bay the most private area of the house is located, containing the bedroom and a dressing room, both separated by a central piece that functions as a bathroom, and on which a new space for guests and a reading area takes place.
The comprehensive nature of the intervention has sought to preserve the exterior cladding and has fundamentally acted to improve its envelope, both constructively and energetically, while maintaining its original aesthetics to the exterior. The interior has sought to approach an absence of partitions, improving finishes, and giving the house a contemporary character. The original load-bearing walls have been subjected to a virtuous and daring structural intervention that has allowed them to become permeable filters supported by light and small posts, generating spatial continuity in a longitudinal and transverse direction, thus making it possible to multiply and enhance the light and, ultimately, the ways of living the house.
