The plan displays an interesting game of geometric abstractions, which intelligently accommodates the housing program, placing the most public areas on the ground floor and the bedrooms or more private areas on the top floor. The house also has a basement with a program dedicated to meetings.
The concrete is used to be able to assimilate the artificial orography well, being an element that allows the project to create a better continuity between the two different levels and make an easier encounter with the terrain.
Greater privacy, "House behind a wall" by La Mirateca. Photograph by Alejandro Gómez Vives.
Description of project by La Mirateca
«Casa detrás de un muro / House behind a wall» is a project resolved based on the initial condition of giving an opaque response to its relationship with the public thoroughfare capable of allowing greater privacy for users and a more comfortable internal functioning without the need to be conditioned for what happens abroad. The absence of the hole in the façade implies creating our own tools to solve the organization of the program and to solve with the same construction what was eliminated by the starting premise.
The plot on which the project is located lacks orographic traces capable of conditioning the building. Alone, a previously created artificial platform is the only significant element and the point where the scheme rests. Three courtyards resolve the night uses and an outdoor space configured by the building and the dividing walls provide a double space for common uses with a sheltered outdoor area.
Concrete makes it possible to resolve the resounding response to the exterior of the project while creating the possibility for the building to meet the ground punctually, naturally assimilating the artificial orography created on the plot so that there is continuity between the different levels. Concrete and its own construction determine the shape of the building while allowing it to be moulded plastically so that the transition between the different heights is continuous and not divided by means of an orthodox superimposition of slabs.
Greater privacy, "House behind a wall" by La Mirateca. Photograph by Alejandro Gómez Vives.
In this sense, the main façade is transformed into a large 24-meter edge beam capable of flying over the ground, creating a shaded area under it and hiding behind it the most intimate spaces of the habitat. Subsequently, it accommodates the access through a ramp that continues with the idea of giving spatial continuity to the exterior elements while allowing a leisurely view of the access and its opening to the landscape of the distant city. In its encounter with the day area, the enclosure disappears and is transformed into large-format glass elements, thus resolving an immediate interior-exterior relationship.
Thus, concrete allows the project not to be a single response and to transform itself as the context generated by the different elements demands.
