Transformation of a workshop into a studio
Small intervention in a built volume located at the bottom of the patio of a house between party walls in Sabadell. These rear constructions were historically used as laundry rooms, small warehouses, but also, on occasion, as workshops for neighbours who worked autonomously at home as weavers, turners, carpenters, locksmiths... In this case we intervened in a small abandoned turnery workshop made up of a very high ground floor and a first floor used as a warehouse.
The owners of the house, which we had already renovated a few years ago, are university professors and needed a studio to work from home, especially after the COVID crisis. The intervention consists, therefore, in cleaning the ground floor of this small construction and practicing a staircase that connects its two levels. This staircase is conceived as a light wooden element, integrated into a large shelf that occupies the entire back wall. To improve interior lighting, the set of openings that opened onto the patio are unified in a large fixed glass attached to a bench and the entrance door. An old balcony that was already in the shed is reused for the door. The study is located on the upper level, while the ground floor is used as a multipurpose space, both for children's play and for study or sports. At a constructive level, the entire existing structure is used, the walls are insulated with an interior SATE made up of a layer of expanded glass and lime mortar. The roof is reinforced with a new sandwich-insulation and the floor, newly built, is left exposed and polished, interspersed with wooden retraction joints. Lastly, the new staircase takes advantage of the tensile work capabilities of wood, to propose structural plans made from slats that are anchored to two roof beams.
This project also wants to be a small tribute to these interior block constructions, full of virtues, which endow the city with complexity and that planning, which reduces the urban volumetry to two parameters – buildable depth and height –, too often condemns to disappearance.
