Casas Patio en Celrà
Girona’s Architectural Award 2014
Finalists to VI Architectural Awards Ascensores Enor 2014
Finalists to FAD Architecture and Interior Design Award 2014
Finalists to XII Premio de Arquitectura de Ladrillo - Hispalyt 2013
The project for 13 row houses with interior courtyards in Celrà aims to explore new possibilities for the typologies that configure the so-called garden city. The research aims to promote areas of intense encounter and exchange between the houses and the urban context and between the houses and the environment.
The absence of a depth limit in the local regulations allows configuring extraordinarily long houses organized around an interior void that seeks to be the centre of gravity of each floor and the spatial focus of all the rooms set up around it. The void is conceived as an interval, a private outdoor room, a source of fresh air and natural light.
The courtyard configures the microclimate of the house and offers an open area for the expansion of the particular microcosms of each inhabitant.
At urban scale, the building intends to enlarge the public space of the street through a wide and open green hall. In order to free the front of the plot for collective use, the communal parking garage is accessed from a single entrance, reducing traffic flow in the entire neighbourhood.
Half of the houses offer a spacious room situated between the parking garage and the street, putting these rooms in direct contact with the green hall. This space, complementary to the program that takes place on the upper floors, is usable as a work space open to passersby (osteopathy consultancy, a workshop for language classes, …), ideal for a very specific use (music room, game room, …) or as a room for a person that wants or needs a certain autonomy (an adolescent, a grandparent, …). The existence of this element that acts as a hinge between the public and domestic spaces proposes the emergence of a certain complexity and richness of uses in the interstices of the garden city, too many times deprived of places for neighbors to mingle.
Ceramics play a fundamental role in the materiality of the project, both on the exterior of the building and in the interior spaces. The use of brick on the facades contextualizes the intervention in its most immediate surroundings: the dark color lends the building neutrality and a certain introversion, seeking to serve as a backdrop for the neighboring modernist factory, and at the same time conferring the role of protagonist to the interior courtyards, which structure the houses. The constantly changing environment and its many nuances throughout the day and throughout the seasons of the year are captured by the interior courtyards’ light-colored ceramic wall coverings, which contribute domesticity and a particular vibration of the light in each of the dwellings.
Structural consultants: Enco, Aplicacions d'Enginyeria i Control
Builder: Capdeferro constructor, s.a.
