Detail

The house is built in a long and narrow plot in a quiet residential area in Madrid, unused for years due to its unusual proportions. It accommodates the floor plan requirements inside a volume only 4 meters wide, resulting in a thin and compact prism. On each level small outdoor spaces are inserted, allowing for a rich spatial experience while keeping the necessary privacy in a dense residential neighborhood. This sequence encompasses a courtyard on the basement level, a garden with a swimming pool on the ground floor and a double-height terrace on the first floor to expand and complement the tight interior of the house. Thus, the usual sequence of stacked levels is challenged and turned into a dynamic vertical landscape.

The rural landscape of Cantabria presents very unequal situations. During the last decades, some areas have been negatively affected as a result of rapid growth, while others have managed to preserve their urban identity shaped by the vernacular architecture of the place, mainly built in stone, wood, and sloping red ceramic tile roofs.

Located on a plot of land in the heart of the block occupied by an 8 stories car park, the project comprises two operations of 75 housing units for sale and 74 social housing units. The project proposes to engage the project’s actors, as well as the inhabitants, in the steps of a rational, visionary, and sustainable approach to urban transformation. The social housing building is built in a wooden structure, while the building for homeownership is built by preserving and adapting the concrete structure of the existing car park. Through their respective specificities, the two projects meet the overall challenge set.

This project seeks a connection between architecture and the natural world, a connection where the building embraces the landscape and vice versa, a connection where architecture submits to the natural environment and where the natural environment is interwoven in a grid that generates open and closed spaces, allowing the existing vegetation to be integrated and to become an essential part of the new building.

The alignment of the enclosed spaces on the ground floor is given by the extension in an annex volume existing in the patio and marked by a large pre-existing wooden beam, re-located and integrated in the current composition. 

The house is located on the buildable outskirts of Gautegiz Arteaga in the surroundings of the wetlands of the Urdaibai biosphere reserve. The watershed formed by the Oka and Golako rivers flows into Mundaka, where they form an extensive estuary flanked by beaches. The climate is humid and temperate with rainfall throughout the year, although less frequent in the summer months.

A pair of two-story houses that are exceptionally efficient in terms of energy, due to the use of natural light as well as rainfall. They are located on a couple of adjacent lots that are also very steep, which is ideal for achieving the best views of the Valle de Bravo Lake from the top floors.

Casa Amigo is located in a residential area of the city of Villa de Merlo, San Luis. It is a house for permanent residency which was designed for a friend who is passionate about gastronomy, folk music, and mountainous landscape.