SM house
The SM house project relates to a single-family residential building inserted within the compact urban fabric of the historic centre.
The proposed intervention reconstruing the conditions of the context, reinterpreting its alignments and visual collimations, establishing itself as an identifying element that can communicate with the surrounding urban space and establishing itself as a pivotal element in the resolution of a portion of urban fabric that has not been resolved yet.
The project fits into the multi-layered fabric as an element capable of building continuity with the present building façade on the ground floor, drawing back on the first floor in an attempt to excavate the stereometric volume by establishing an alternation of solids and empty spaces.
The architecture consists of a two-pitched volume that captures the progression of the ridges and roofing of the two buildings to which it is anchored. The building is a simple composition of three different elements that contribute to resolving the heterogeneity of the surrounding fabric: a low body that has the task of resolving the relationship with the road, a higher volume capable of resolving the alignments of the ridges and a technical element entrusted with the task of resolving the alignment with the built volume to the north inside the courtyard.
The internal space established a recognisable thickness in adherence to the existing building that houses cabinets, technical rooms, service spaces and the staircase connecting the ground floor and the first floor; like a large inhabited wall it resolves the relationship with the adjacent building, becoming the support element to the main areas.
The double-height living room creates an extraordinary space capable of characterising the living area and the entrance space.
The main lighting on the ground floor consists of a large window overlooking the inner courtyard, and two openings on the street facing the public space. The two openings on the ground floor lend identity to the street front in an attempt to form urban proportions while underlining the morphological variation of the fabric in the alternation between full and empty spaces, cavities and limits. The opening on the first floor, located in the corner, overlooks the terrace and emphasises the stereometry of the volume, providing it with a double exposure.
From the material point of view, a feature of the project is the reinterpretation of traditional materials. The finish of the façade, made of beige-coloured bush-hammered cement plaster, establishes a cultural continuity through the reinterpretation of the material of the local architectural culture. The dialectic between history and contemporaneity is also reinterpreted in the use of a burnished metal roof that characterises the insertion of the volume into the fabric.
