LM SINGLE FAMILY HOUSE_POZUELO DE ALARCÓN
The house is the wall. Before even wall, rammed earth. And that canvas, the original act of architecture as an artifice against nature, must describe so well the space that it apprehends, that its absence is also a limit. This is a house, born of drawn boundaries and absent borders; of what happens between them.
The house is built through the gradual introduction of its inhabitant from the public space of the street to the domestic rooms and the garden. Thus, the street is grafted into the plot through stone slabs. Within a few meters, a wall accompanies us. The descent course continues down stone steps, the deck that floats above us, together with the cobblestone path and the wall, construct the area of the entrance hall. In the background, the door. When crossing it, the hall swells in a space of confluence and bifurcation. From here onwards we go to the public rooms or to the private ones on the ground floor and the semi-buried floor. The space of the living room stretches out vertically reaching up to a height and a half. Within it, central to it, the fire hearth to one side and the cooking fire on its opposite, order the chamber. We walk on towards the veranda and, beyond it, the garden. In the center of the house, the roman impluvium, the pool in an enclosed orchard. And throughout the journey, level to our eyes, the horizon; under it, first, the landscape of the forest park of Somosaguas, ash groves sprinkled with some oaks; above, in the background, the Guadarrama Mountains; Madrid, outlined from the banks of the Manzanares river, to the East.
This courtyard house is a balance between the express gravity of the sliding concrete walls, ashlars born from the ground, and the almost nothing, the suggested absence of glass.
