This building houses various forms of care, both inside and outside the homes, promoting energy efficiency and environmental quality through an interesting volumetric organization, which allows natural ventilation and its combination with curtain walls, which guarantees that the natural climatic conditions are optimal, which allow the project to have open and malleable links with the outside, avoiding subjecting the older population to contemporary isolation.
As the architects comment: "Relying on the advantage of creating a front terrace that allows a strong connection with the street and favours the formation of an informal community of neighbours," the formal strategies used in the context created by the row houses are rebalanced.
Beyond-the-family Kin by Ignacio G. Galán + OF Architects. Photograph by Imagen Subliminal.
Project description by Ignacio G. Galán + OF Architects
Beyond-the-family Kin is a platform for empowering ageing. It operates within a network of infrastructures shaping a renewed social movement for aging in place. Countering the increasing isolation of older residents or their subjection to institutionalized forms of residence, the project hosts diverse forms of care across generations beyond the nuclear family both within and outside the house and furnishes technological and financial strategies supporting the life of its occupants.
Beyond-the-family Kin by Ignacio G. Galán + OF Architects. Photograph by Imagen Subliminal.
Located at the end of a row of single-family houses on the outskirts of the city, the project combines diverse living arrangements on each of its three floors, with different degrees of autonomy and interdependence between them. While none of them neatly responds to the needs of the hegemonic family, together they facilitate kinship-in-the-making: the first floor, accessed through the street through a short ramp, contains a sequence of spaces for an ageing couple with increasing mobility difficulties; above it, a pair of rooms flanking a living space is planned to host the couple’s frequent visitors within their extended and chosen family; the lower level is organized as a one-bedroom apartment that the couple could rent to pursue financial stability or might host an attendant should they need one. The proximity of the city’s main university campus could also lead to rehearsing models that connect students and ageing individuals for affordable housing, shared resources, and mutual care. Ultimately, Beyond-the-family Kin counters constructed notions of the family house as an autonomous and stable social unit while acknowledging the relations of dependency between the inhabitants and their social and material environments.
Beyond-the-family Kin by Ignacio G. Galán + OF Architects. Photograph by Imagen Subliminal.
A cascading sequence of terraces enhances a range of ecologies and activities hosted within the project, creates opportunities for socialization between the different occupants of the residence, and grounds the house within diverse networks of the neighbourhood. The front terrace, which the project privileges, enables a strong connection with the street and favours the formation of a loose community of neighbours—countering current design strategies for row houses in the area that favour of a more secluded backyard. Several rolling pots and a beehive on the roof terrace are part of a system of urban farms which prevails in the neighbourhood despite its recent parcel subdivisions and densification while other gardening opportunities are distributed throughout the project. A small pool serves for exercising for the residents and their friends. With a ridge silhouette in dialogue with suburban industrial facilities and its stark colour palette, the house seeks to attain a certain centrality in the neighbourhood despite its small scale—as a key node of its social life. Neither nostalgic about old forms of sociality nor submitting to the contemporary isolation of ageing populations, the project celebrates open and malleable linkages and affiliations.
Beyond-the-family Kin by Ignacio G. Galán + OF Architects. Photograph by Imagen Subliminal.
Finally, several interconnected formal and technological strategies favour the energy efficiency and environmental quality of the project. The house’s complex volume allows the majority of its rooms to open in more than one façade, facilitating cross ventilation and natural cooling, which are enhanced by the staircase operating as an air shaft. Operable windows in the living room’s sawtooth roof enhance both lighting and ventilation in this key space. Automatized louvres in the windows control heat gains and lighting from different orientations. A prominent structure in the roof optimizes the orientation of the solar panels that power an extremely efficient system of heating and cooling radiating floors. Combined with a rear-ventilated curtain-wall tile facade with rain-screen ceramic cladding and corrugated steel panels, these systems guarantee that no AC will be needed in the project even in the extreme weather of Madrid. Conceived as overlapping approaches to empowering the life of its ageing occupants, these strategies are additionally committed to preserving the rights of future generations.
