CASA JAM
Casa JAM occupies the top floor of a residential building in Argüelles, embedded within the 19th-century urban grid of Madrid’s Castro Plan. Characterized by its large deep blocks, interior courtyards, and homes with high ceilings and generous proportions, this urban fabric provides the setting for the renovation of a 78 m² apartment with a 12 m² east-facing terrace.
The space is conceived as a refuge for Toni, an aerospace project manager, journalist, and pop culture enthusiast, and his dog Kea. The commission stemmed from a dual ambition, as precise as it was ambitious: to inhabit the interior of an artwork and to design his definitive place of residence.
The original layout presented a complex typological challenge: a tube apartment 18 meters long and barely 3.5 meters wide at its narrowest point. Its organization responded to the traditional domestic logic of a dark corridor attached to the party wall, distributing access to independent and isolated rooms. This configuration recalls historical models that, from early examples such as John Thorpe’s Beaufort House (1587), established the corridor as an architectural device of segregation and control, prioritizing social and hygienist division over spatial communication.
The intervention questions the inherited condition of the corridor and explores spatial alternatives capable both of dissolving its limits and imagining new uses and configurations within it. Assuming that access occurs from one end of the dwelling (forcing entry through the most private area) the project blurs the boundaries of conventional circulation through a large diagonal that structures the space.
Drawing on historian Robin Evans’s theories on domestic connectivity, doors and thresholds cease to function as barriers of separation and hierarchy and instead become mediators of encounter, transition, and spatial ambiguity.
A system of floor-to-ceiling sliding doors, executed in different materials, textures, and polychromies, transforms the former corridor into an open, continuous, and malleable experience. Depending on the position of these movable filters, the rooms connect or separate, compress or expand, allowing the house to function as a living and mutable organism that accompanies Toni’s daily rituals and changing needs.
Four concatenated volumes articulate this chromatic and material transition from the intimate to the collective. The first, a Klein blue box attached to the entrance, contains the bathroom. The second houses the bedroom and dressing room, protected behind the warmth of large wooden frames and ribbed glass. The third, green in color, corresponds to the shower. The fourth, a yellow kitchen, is conceived simultaneously as a hub of activity and a panoptic device from which to observe the common space.
Beyond this yellow ceramic filter, the space opens up into a large shared room that unifies the dining area, living room, and a small workspace. The spatial sequence, characterized by the pursuit of clean lines and the integration of furniture as architectural infrastructure, culminates in the terrace. Conceived as an exterior room open to the Madrid sky, it acts as the final space of the house, dissolving the boundary between the domestic interior and the urban landscape.
Like pop culture collages, Casa JAM seeks to operate beyond rigid housing conventions. Through strategies of superimposition, transparency, and dynamism, the project transforms the rigidity of the historic floor plan into a playful setting that celebrates the multiplicity and freedom of contemporary dwelling.
