Harquitectes has completed 'Casa 905' in Igualada, Barcelona with a wide veranda that surrounds its central living core.
Often the site itself generates conditions, affecting the project in almost every decision. It is not the case with this house. The sun, the geometry of the plot (almost square with a chamfer), an excessively close neighbor to the south, and a tower of flats to the north, more typical of a residential estate of the sixties than of this piece of garden city where it is located the solar. Four inputs wrongly counted.
The owners wanted a house without maintenance, with a lot of privacy and a good relationship with the garden – more like a patio – throughout the year. With these conditions the designers were clear that history had to be written almost from scratch or, rather, from within, with the building itself.
The new house is structured in four concentric layers parallel to the limits of the site, like an onion. From exterior to interior: the masonry fence, the perimeter patio and a continuous gallery that surrounds the central body, a masonry box made of concrete block with two floors. In the initial phases of the project, when the house was larger, the perimeter gallery was an intermediate space, bioclimatized, with complementary uses, and all the main pieces were housed in the core of the house.
Subsequently, due to budgetary adaptation, the surface was reduced and in the central body only the rooms, the bathrooms and the staircase remained. The common areas passed to the gallery and the life of the owners happens exactly there. It is a veranda, which proposes intense and variable, seasonal relations with the patio; in summer, through the large sliding walls it becomes a porch; in winter, large windows in the corners offer framed views of the garden and capture solar radiation to the west. Thanks to the sliding doors, the architects created “mobile gates”, a condition that constantly transforms the façade and the gallery, depending on what is open and what is closed.
