My Family and Other Animals
Refurbishment of an apartment in Lavapies, Madrid (Spain).
Everyday dynamics involve a plethora of actors and practices that establish unstable relations with architectural frameworks and consistently challenge the conventional understanding of domesticity and the family as the privileged unit of inhabitation. This house considers these contingent relations and expanded boundaries through a flexible typology retrofitted with a series of devices that acknowledge changing patterns of inhabitation while allowing for the materialization of dynamic attachments and affections within architecture.
“My house and other animals” results from an intervention in an old apartment. It transforms its spatial and programmatic structure previously defined as a sequence of small rooms and defines a new organization of interconnected spaces along the apartment’s structural bays. A system of interventions mediating the scale of furniture and architecture qualify these bays and facilitate their occupation. They address the needs of a cat, a thirty-something man, his work life and the parties he likes to host. These interventions mediate the attachments structuring ordinary life as well as the expanding forms of sociality involved in this sequence of non-ordinary events hosted in the apartment. They facilitate the required spatial adaptations while allowing for future changes and expected transformations.
