- Dump the house to the courtyard.
- Control of views.
- Use only natural materials taking full advantage of their texture.
Project description by Arturo Sanz and Fran López
Benimaclet was an orchard town that was absorbed by the city of Valencia in the second half of the last century. It houses village houses with small-scale multi-family buildings, as is the case at hand: a three-storey building, consisting of 6 houses, which, on the ground floor and through a central access, gives access in the courtyard of block to buildings of two heights belonging to each of the houses of the building. The intervention we present consists in the reconstruction of one of these buildings, belonging to one of the houses on the ground floor, and its connection with it. The low constructive quality and habitability problems of this building advised its demolition and volumetric reconstruction.
Targets of the project:
- Dump the house to the courtyard, landscaped patio with a tree, vines and grass. The kitchen is located in the connecting piece of the house with the pavilion, turning the patio into the center piece of the house, both functionally and spatially.
- Control of views between the annexed pavilion and the homes of the upper floors and protect the pavilion from excessive sunning in summer.
- Use only natural materials taking full advantage of their texture to leave them uncoated. All the intervention gravitates on three elements: the cooked clay, the white walls and the wood.
Use of cooked clay:
- Pavements and wall cladding made with mechanized pieces of baked clay of two sizes: 24x12x3 cm. and 24x5.5x3 cm. with a rig that combines both sizes. In the most vulnerable areas of the wet premises these same pieces have been enameled in white, prior to their placement, by the same owner of the house that is licensed in Fine Arts.
- Revoltones of the slabs made with curved Mallorcan vault supported by metal joists.
- Ceramic latticework made with the Square Lattice piece, of size 20x20x8 cm, especially cut for this work at 45º, getting a shielded piece that gives the latticework a greater frontal opacity and a directionality that allows choosing the NE orientation because it is this which provides better views from inside the pavilion.
