House 8×8
Architects
Sol89. María González & Juanjo López de la Cruz
Collaborators
Cristóbal Galocha, Elena González, Rosa Gallardo, Mónica Bidoli; Miguel Sibón, installations
Technical Architect
Cristóbal Galocha
Client
Private
Construction Company
Meta 360 S.L.
Fotografía
Fernando Alda
The bays of the traditional historic homes in Seville are rarely wider than three meters, a constraint imposed by the length of the roundwood timber or the small squared timbers typically used in construction. This unit of measurement provides a recognizable domestic scale that is replicated throughout the continuous magma of the city’s historic fabric. The limited dimensions of spaces confined by walls do not allow living areas and pathways to coexist within the same corridor, hence the traditional use of galleries, external staircases, and courtyards as communication spaces. The project involves one of these popular homes, an 8×8 meter terraced house built with three corridors perpendicular to the facade, each divided into three rooms, one of which is a centrally located courtyard at the back.
The existing home, a product of a renovation some decades ago, ignored the courtyard and wasted space by introducing a transverse hallway to provide access to various rooms. The current intervention proposes hollowing out the entire central corridor, introducing a staircase that lands in the central areas of each lateral corridor, designated for the wet cores, leaving the corners illuminated and ventilated by the street and the courtyard. The staircase eventually reaches the roof through a continuous path, allowing zenithal lighting from the top level down to the courtyard. The new central space acts as a large skylight illuminating the heart of the house, where the metal staircase is inserted, supported by a stepped base covered with the original marble recovered from the demolition. Thus, the courtyard is incorporated into the house by opening up to this central space, and a vertical communication emerges that does not require hallways to articulate the checkerboard of rooms that make up the dwelling. A second circulatory order around the staircase – on the ground floor through the courtyard and on the first floor via a small study on the facade that forms a dense, internal window towards the staircase – offers various housing combinations. These will allow this modest home to adapt in the future to the changes that are yet to come in the lives of its inhabitants.
