Santes Creus is the capital of the municipality of Aiguamúrcia. It is located on the left bank of the Gaià river, around the Real Monestir de Santa Maria de Santes Creus, one of the jewels of 12th century Cistercian art in Catalonia. Created in 1843 in the old monastery buildings, the town includes places of interest related to the monastic building such as the stone bridge, the Gothic cross, the small Baroque church of Santa Llúcia and the old modernist cooperative winery. Following the main street, which leads to the monastery, on the detour from where the Aiguamúrcia road leaves, there is the well-known Alameda de Santes Creus, unique as a riverside forest in all of Catalonia, declared a space of natural interest.
A family building that originally dates on XVII-XVIII centuries and which had suffered several interventions. The floor plan was used for many years as a blacksmith workshop, what gives to the building a special character. The time going by and the lack of maintenance have caused that the building presented a bad state of preservation, what means that otherwise repaired, it could be degraded in a short period of time.
It is projected a rehabilitation in several phases, starting by the roof, continuing to facades and terrace, and ending by the indoors, with the will of renovating the building respecting its antiquity and its character.
A growing family sets out the necessity of enlarge their home of three rooms and 85m2 by adding a second apartment, originally with two rooms and 60m2. The main premise to keep in mind is that the family has to be able to keep on living in their own home during the construction course.
The morphologic analysis of the original apartment emphasize that the night space presented a functional distribution of three rooms and two bathrooms, with minimum circulation area and a suitable size. Furthermore, day space presented an excessive fragmentation and a smaller size. That’s why it is chosen to keep the night space and remodel and enlarge the day space, excluding the kitchen.
Minerva Galleries make up the commercial ground floor of a multi-family building built in the 70s in the expansion district of Tarragona. Like most commercial galleries implanted between mid and late last century, they are covered and opened only to pedestrians. Being, therefore, precursor elements at the birth of the shopping centers, whose arrival has meant that most commercial galleries have closed the doors or have been reconfigured. This is the case of the Minerva Galleries, which has seen how retail trade has been disappearing and its premises have been transformed into offices or professional consultations, like this project.
Our project is located in the middle of an old and compact urban area where historical buildings are lined up with the streets. We didn’t want to break this rhythm so we have also chosen to line up with the main street.
The shape of the building and its inclined façades respond to the wish of creating three articulated squares, more adapted to the neighborhood character, instead of a big square which, due to the scarce architectonic value of the adjacent buildings, we believe inappropriate.
The OE House is a montage. The clients wanted a double house, so they could move from one half to the other, according to their state of mind. They did not like to spend their holidays traveling; they preferred to move downstairs, and do it for real, closing the quarters above. We provided them with two well-known domestic environments—the open frame of the case study houses for the hedonistic pleasure of the warm season, topped with the interiorized existentialism of Le Corbusier’s Maison Jaoul for the windy months in la Sierra de la Mussara. We did it literally. The resulting exquisite corpse—wrapped by the most Spanish architectural prop of all: the persiana—ensures the schizophrenic differentiation of modes of habitation as much as it negotiates the impossible encounter of both types.
Buildings constructed until mid of XX century in Spain, and still in certain well standing areas incorporated an apartment for the doorman. Since it was considered that the penthouse was the worse and smallest place of the building, this was the place where to accommodate people in charge of the door control and cleaning.
Today, those spaces go to the community ownership and are rediscovered to people who acquired as an opportunity to enjoy the open space in crowd city environments.
Tarragona’s historical stone construction tradition, as well as the image of the Roman city walls, made us decide to treat the house’s ground floor as a dry stone plinth emerging from the ground.
The pine forest where the land is located creates a series of vertical and repetitive shadowy traces of trunks, branches and leaves. The light that sifts through the forest generates pleasant atmospheres of lights and shadows.
Located on the ground floor of a residential building from the 60s of the 20th century located in the Tarragona area, it is planned to redesign a house that was divided programmatically into four rooms, a living room and a bathroom (these two last elements of small dimensions taking into account the 87 m2 that presents the usable surface housing in the plant).
Once the morphology of the existing house was analysed, it was detected that although the living room communicated with the terrace, this one was small, at the same time that between the living room and the kitchen there was a room that was the cause of the existence of a corridor that consumed surface to the detriment of the living room itself, the kitchen and the bathroom. At the same time, the two existing inner courtyards in the building, did not illuminate properly the rooms with which they contacted due to the state of the windows and to the original distribution of the house.
The program requested by the client consisted of a living room, dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms, a study, a bathroom, a multi-purpose cleaning space and a storage space.
The project to expand and rehabilitate the Gon-Gar Workshop involves the reorganization of an organically growing industrial cluster consisting of two industrial buildings and the owners’home, which make up this agricultural machinery repair company. The complex has been located for almost 50 years in the centre of the compact urban area of Benissanet, a small, essentially rural and agricultural town of barely 1,200 inhabitants, located on the right bank of the lower River Ebre.
email
Facebook
Twitter
RSS Feed
