House in the Market

Situation Mercado de Feria, Sevilla
Area 250 m2
Year 2012

Architects
Sol89. María González & Juanjo López de la Cruz

Client
Privado

Construction Company
Fernández Carbonero SL y autoconstrucción

Photography
Fernando Alda

Being born on the bustling Ancha de la Feria street and confronting the teeming humanity just as one has grown tired of crawling and has risen to face life bare-chested is a heroic endeavor that shapes character. It holds extraordinary significance for the rest of one’s life, for suddenly the street provides the neophyte with a perfect synthesis of the Universe. These are streets that have miraculously sustained centuries of intense life without their volume of past aging them; they are old yet don’t appear so. Without forgetting anything, they live a feverish and authentic present, vibrating with the restlessness of every hour; with each generation, they renew themselves invisibly and most naturally.

 

Manuel Chaves Nogales, A Child on a Street in Seville, in Juan Belmonte, Bullfighter, 1970.

 

The project stems from an urgent situation: a municipal execution order necessitates immediate intervention in this late 19th-century house to address the issues identified in a technical inspection conducted years earlier.

The imposed haste and limited investment influence the mode of intervention; we decide to demolish and dismantle concurrently with the project development, gradually uncovering what the house might conceal. We remove the false ceilings, partitions, and coatings that have obscured walls and frameworks since an attempt in the 1980s to transform the dwelling into a sort of apartment – an unattainable effort to tame the ambiguity of this centennial abode of butchers from the adjacent market that sinuously penetrates the block.

Imagen
Imagen
Imagen
Imagen
Imagen

In this process, where erasing is more essential than drawing and the project is continuously made and unmade, we gradually uncover a latent house that lay hidden, shrouded beneath the disguise of partitions, mortars, and plasters. Wooden frameworks and walls marked by openings sealed over time narrate a construction drawn in strokes, born from ongoing negotiation with its neighbors, leading to the continuous transformation of its profile over the years. On the fly, we decide to remove the worst frameworks and beams, introduce lintels, and reclaim spaces that existed at another time, sacrificing surface area to gain volume. We also choose to preserve those revealed elements that tell the story of that place, accepting that time too constructs. The house begins to resemble what it initially must have been: a place where construction and void alternate in similar proportion.

Imagen
Imagen

We continue unveiling patiently, more like archaeologists than builders, and the poor condition of the walls and lintels on the street-level floor, where an abandoned market bar existed, necessitates intervention. We then decide to do very little, merely reclaiming the void of that floor by linteling walls to let air pass. Thus emerges a continuation of the street space that enters the house, like a passage, a vestibule, or a parapet, like the voids that blur the common space in the jumbled yet porous layout of central Seville. This place becomes the “garden” of the dwelling, with the peculiarity of being beneath it, a program-less space where all uses can occur, a site of passages and encounters like the tumultuous plaza of the Feria street market itself.

The project turns out to be like a text continued from an existing one, where paragraphs rendered illegible by the passage of time had to be erased, and where what was already written was read patiently so that the new lines coexist with the previous ones, continuing the story begun long ago.

Imagen
Imagen
Imagen
Imagen