Renovation

J29 responds to the necessity of upgrading a house from the 70s located in the neighborhood of Embajadores; with a very compartmentalized structure that would be transformed into a fluid space. The soul of the project is an integrated kitchen with an industrial island. The beginning: a conversation and the challenge of combining an en-suite master room with a large kitchen-living room area, on a very tight budget as the starting point of this story.

We present the idea of a house square as a counterpoint to the commercial surroundings. The highlight of the new café, therefore, would be the opposition to the surroundings and this possibility of an open square to the street, valuing the existing house as a kind of refuge, of retreat.

There was the backyard where my grandfather kept a vegetable garden next to the house which, in the past, was the family’s residence — still from a distant time when there was no running water or electricity. When I was a child and spent time with my grandparents, I liked to go to the “quintal” (backyard), as it was called. At that time the house only served as support for the vegetable garden and shelter for a small rabbit and chicken farm. I’ve always liked the long, narrow, walled-in backyard setup.

Intended to accommodate a family, the project is designed as a series of sequences that stage the way from the street to the garden, creating a spatial fluid sequencing through the house. This gradation crosses the house from the more common areas to the most intimate ones. All the new spaces revolve around the existing house, which is the point of reference when wandering between the different functions.

Built in 1880-1881, the building was very uncharacterized inside. It had been subjected to interventions that compromised the state of conservation of its elements and disqualified its interior space. Although it was originally conceived as a single-family dwelling, it was excessively compartmentalized by walls erected to transform this building into collective housing – a reflection of the excessive desire for the profitability of housing space in recent decades in urban centers, often (and in this case) without the care or respect for the space and materiality that this type of building contains.