House with Two and a Half Courtyards
Architects
Sol89. María González & Juanjo López de la Cruz
Collaborators
Elena González and Rosa Gallardo, architects; Javier Valenzuela, architecture student; Alejandro Cabanas, Structure; Miguel Sibón, Installations
Technical Architects
Cristóbal Galocha
Client
Private
Construction Company
Alejandro Fdez. Carbonero Construcciones SL
Photography
Fernando Alda
The courtyard is thus the center of the house in every sense. It is like a stove that distributes heat and air. There should always be a corner in the sun, always one in the shade. Through its walls, the daylight turns, and the night enters with its mystery. The courtyard is a symbol and reminder of that unrenounceable piece of paradise that remains intact in the soul.
María Zambrano, Aurora.*
The initial conditions—a plot more deep than wide with a single front open to a tree-lined street of generous acacias, a house that does not need to exhaust the buildability or the heights that the regulations allow, and the desire to differentiate the workspace from the domestic habitat of its owners—suggest understanding the unbuilt areas as project material that shapes an expanded house complementary to the interior one. Thus arises a succession of voids concatenated in section capable of articulating the different degrees of privacy claimed, providing extension spaces to the interior rooms, and orienting the bedrooms towards courtyards, ensuring protection against street noise, cross ventilation, and natural lighting coming from the south located at the back of the plot.
The owners, a couple with a small child, require spaces to work from home, suggesting prolonged stays throughout the day, between concentration and rest, which incites the need for relaxation transits between both activities. The house thus acquires a double reading, between public and private, that we must know how to nuance. The first area accessed from the public road will be a place of lost steps, offering a gradual entrance that culminates in a backlit first courtyard reaching an open longitudinal gallery. This space, more public than private, from which we reach the one-flight staircase around which the house pivots, is a threshold that will allow differentiated entry to the dwelling or the demanded workspaces, through the sequence street-lobby-courtyard-gallery, a catalog of intermediate places of the best southern tradition that form an interior landscape.
*Note: María Zambrano, a renowned Spanish philosopher and essayist, is quoted here to evoke the profound connection between the soul and the architectural element of the courtyard, a common feature in traditional Andalusian homes
