Transformation of an abandoned building into 27 apartments
A new life for a forgotten building. A reuse and recycling project that revises the coastal tourism model by proposing a temporary reconnection with the history of the place.
The natural harbour of Salauris has been a strategic place on the Mediterranean coast from a military, commercial and finally tourist point of view since the second half of the 20th century since the Iberians and Romans.
Essentially a fishing village throughout history, Salou began to receive its first holidaymakers in the 19th century thanks to the initiative of the new industrial bourgeoisie of Reus and the construction of the railway. This gradually transformed the fishing village into a small spa town, with a focus on health and wellness tourism. Several Art Noveau houses on the seafront, where rooms could be rented at the beginning of the 20th century, are testimony to these first holidaymakers in search of the therapeutic power of seawater.
For almost 50 years, Salou grew slowly and timidly as a garden city along its coastline thanks to the success of its spa. However, from the 1960s onwards, the Costa Dorada, especially Salou, experienced unprecedented growth with the tourist development of Spanish coastal towns. This generated a heterogeneous urban landscape dominated by hotels, apartment buildings and restaurants that coexist with blocks of typical dwellings and facilities, forming a mixed and heterogeneous urban context of isolated volumetries.
The project revolves around one of these isolated buildings near the seafront, initially conceived as a house on a podium, to which floors were added to house, since the early 2000s, a nursing home. The building showed, after 13 years of abandonment, severe signs of degradation and generated public order problems in its surroundings.
Sixty years after the tourist boom in Salou, how should temporary housing be approached today, and how does tourism have to respond to the social and environmental challenges we are facing?
The project aims to give the building a new lease of life through renovation and transformation. Reusing its architecture rather than demolition, the first project decision, presented obvious spatial limitations, but allowed budget adjustment and a significant environmental benefit. It also reduced the carbon footprint of the intervention by avoiding the energy used in demolition, the transport of rubble, and new construction, as well as the generation of waste.
The project is conceived as a big house. It aims to flee from the mass tourism model to seek identity in the first holidaymakers and their hotel residences of the early 20th century on a conceptual and material level. It proposes a temporary dialogue and an alternative model of life to mass tourism: a slow, local and local model, deseasonalised, adapted to the Mediterranean climate, and rooted in the original architectural tradition of the place, born of spa tourism.
At the same time, as an alternative to the generic and global housing model oriented towards summer holidays and generalised from the 1960s onwards, the new flats want to be houses, warm, welcoming domestic spaces rooted in the local culture that can be occupied all year round.
Strategically, it has been considered that both the building and the flats can meet habitability standards so that the complex can easily be converted into a permanent residential building at any time.
The metamorphosis of the building is the result of a sum of accumulated interventions on the pre-existence and is divided into four basic strategies:
Consolidate and reorganise
The first action of the project aims to rethink the functioning of the building and to achieve a stable and safe primary structure. The precarious wall structure and floor slabs have been preserved and reinforced. The floors have been completely reorganised by adding a new staircase and two lifts, forming an encircling central core that organises the circulation flow and allows the room units to be located on the perimeter of the façade.
Ordering and linking
To improve the habitability of the complex, it is proposed to enhance the relationship of the building with the exterior. Due to its limited height, the existing attic, an uninhabitable space, has been eliminated, and a new roof terrace has been created. At the same time, the side façades have been redesigned and arranged, opening new windows, the essential ones permitted by the regulations, to achieve lighting and ventilation for all the dwellings and, at the same time, achieve a more unified urban image, maintaining the existing, more orderly windows on the front façades. Finally, the existing body on the ground floor has been opened to the exterior and transformed into the reception and restaurant, a gallery connected to the garden that concentrates the accesses, creating a new entrance porch and allowing for generous terraces in the flats on the first floor.
Isolate and contextualise. Thirdly, the energy improvement of the building and the search for an identity. The entire existing volume has been insulated outside with a new thermal skin that fulfils both a technical and a conceptual function. This unique envelope allows the building to achieve optimum energy efficiency and, through ceramics, to seek a new identity by historically connecting the building with the art nouveau houses of the early 20th century.
Open and naturalise
Finally, the exterior spaces and the building's relationship with the city have been reconsidered. A Mediterranean garden has replaced the existing outdoor paved terrace with low maintenance and water demand, eliminating the heat island effect, allowing natural rainwater drainage, and creating shaded areas. The new garden has been visually and physically opened to the public space by making the building accessible with a new ramp, transforming a harsh and rough exterior into a small oasis.
At the programme level, the building has collective, technical, and service spaces on the ground floor, and 6 flat typologies, two on the ground floor and four on each type of floor. The conception of the flats, inserted into the existing wall structure, is a concatenation of basic cells that can be independent or connected, enhancing good sunlight, double orientation, and cross ventilation. Thus, all housing units have a space for cooking and eating, a space for resting, and a space for washing.
As for materials, only one material, ceramics, in only one format is used. A single piece in two finish versions that solves all project situations: the tiles in natural finish and the enamelled tiles in bottle green, used to contextualise the facade with the history of the place, following the art noveau building tradition of the summer houses in Salou. A single piece that simultaneously assumes technical, aesthetic, and symbolic functions and characterises the project holistically.
