House 10×10

Situation Barrio de Nervión, Sevilla
Area 230 m2
Year 2020

Architects
Sol89. María González & Juanjo López de la Cruz

Collaborators
Cristóbal Galocha, Elena González, Rosa Gallardo, Mª Luisa Benítez; DimArq, installations; Alejandro Cabanas, structure

Technical Architects
Fernando Tarriño & Julián Fernández

Client
Private

Construction Company
Construcciones Javier Guzmán S.L.

Photography
Fernando Alda

An urban dwelling with an extensive family program like this one requires a substantial number of technical and minor spaces that are as crucial for domestic life as the so-called main ones. Bathrooms, toilets, kitchens, pantries, laundry rooms, drying areas, utility rooms, storage spaces, wardrobes, planters, staircases, bicycle storage, and terraces make up a repertoire of active spaces that are as decisive in the design as those dedicated to relaxed living.

The geometry of the plot where the house is located, a ten-meter square with three party walls and a south-facing facade, combined with its location on the edge of a low-density neighborhood facing the back of a busy avenue, suggests moving this collection of small spaces to the perimeter of the plot. This arrangement frees the center of the square for living areas, which are protected by a double belt of storage enclosures and installations.

A double brick wall, the first exterior and the second interior, thickens the boundaries of the plot and houses the four concrete pillars set back from the party walls that support the slabs of each floor. The first-floor slab is lightened in the Serlian manner, and the second-floor slab is resolved at two heights to address the level difference between the terrace and the interior. The rooms with wet installations are arranged in the outer ring, allowing natural ventilation and associating the downpipes and installation columns with the four concrete supports.

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A quarter of the inner square is reserved for the courtyard onto which the living-kitchen and the main bedroom open, so that the other three bedrooms are protected from southern sunlight and the immediacy of the street by the loggia formed by the thick skin. At the entrance to the house, the doubling of the facade creates a vestibule where bicycles can be left and which mediates the transition between public and private. This double facade endows the domestic interior and urban exterior openings with the appropriate scale, each face responding to the desired functional or figurative requirements. Lastly, the roof terrace is conceived as a place for celebration and gathering, so we propose reaching this level with a certain independence from the rest of the house. We thus propose a one-flight staircase inserted between the two brick boxes as a parapet, a tangential and outdoor transition that skirts the living spaces allowing almost independent access to the different floors.

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The intention to incorporate the courtyard space into the living room suggests using the same material for the walls of both to blur the boundaries between the interior and intermediate spaces. A grayish brick that alternates the English and Castilian formats makes up the two wall boxes that form the thick skin of the house. This ceramic materiality, together with that of the ribbing of the concrete slabs, gives the space a constructive expression that nuances the abstraction of the floor.

The house adopts the type of central floor surrounded by minor spaces as a result of the dimensions of the plot and the boundary conditions. Trust is placed in the concentric geometry that this spatial arrangement entails as an argument to establish fluid and dense relationships between the different spaces of the house, between those that we inhabit slowly and those that allow the unfolding of daily life.

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