V House. Restoration and extension of La Rabadeira by Dosis de Arquitectura

Memory of project by Dosis de Arquitectura

Casa V is the restoration, adaptation and extension of an existing house, designed and built in the early 1960’s. The family that owns the house has been spending their holidays in it for almost fifty years. In that time, even though the number of family members has increased, the house had remained the same, being now unable to fulfill current and future needs. The intentions of the project were to create a place where three generations of the same family could enjoy their holidays simultaneously.

For that purpose, a new house is made for the two younger generations, which consists on a side wing that articulates itself with the old building on the northeast. The rooftop of this new house serves as a private garden for the pre-existing house as a landscape response to the existing topography. The original house accommodates now the spaces for family and social interaction, as well as the rooms of the first generation. Each family member has its own independence while remaining a part of a single set.

A multilayered wall defined by a single construction detail, which serves both as structure and as thermal and environmental overcoat, meanders in order to embrace the multiplicity of events that occur in the house. Spaces are defined by the unfolding of matter in space-time, which topologically adapts itself to what happens inside. The new house is formalized by the continuous flow of a completely neutral wrap – no edges, no color, no texture - and, within this wrapping, life and action are the main figures.

Environmental strategies

Assuming an exergy matching strategy (exergy = useful energy) between energy use requirements and specific architectural solutions, minimizing maintenance costs and optimizing the building's exergy performance. Thermal insulation is situated on the outside of the external shell, together with an element that provides thermal inertia mass inside. In the case of the intensive gardening intensive system, that not only integrates the building in the existing ecosystems, but gives the building a large additional insulation, both thermal and acoustic, to the additional thermal inertia provided by the slab concrete.

The building incorporates a natural heating system within the orientation of the windows, a reinterpretation of the vernacular glass colonnade of La Coruña. By varying the opening position through the meander of the facade, the interior receives a greater number of hours of solar incidence, which allows natural warming by greenhouse effect that in this geographical location is an optimal energy sustainability strategy used in vernacular architecture in La Coruña. The house has also a solar heating system vacuum tube, which reduces considerably the use of conventional fuel.