Transformation of a old housing in advertising office
Archeological cuts in the heart of the historic city
The city always hides, under its walls, hidden secrets, forgotten situations and opportunities that do not appear at first sight. Matters, objects, spaces, are there, dormant, waiting to be discovered. In these cases one would like to be an archaeologist to, with his infinite tenacity and patience, scratch the surface, stripping the architecture of its multiple layers superimposed over the years until it reaches its skeleton. We would classify the found materials to displace them, replacing them in a completely new way. We would also draw a map of everything we have found to keep it always present.
The advertising company BABYDOG decided to move to an old house located on the fourth floor of a mediating building in the center of the historic center of the city of Granada. This house, elongated, with a short facade to the street and bounded by the narrow courtyard of the community and a tiny ventilation space, was absolutely compartmentalized: seven small rooms were organized by a long corridor that ran through the house throughout from the playgroung. Only the rooms located on the façade had sufficient conditions of habitability. The needs demanded by a program like this, an office, forced a complete structuring of the property.
The first thing to be tackled would be the punctual discarding of all the walls to discover that the elements analyzed were part of a complex structural framework of load-bearing walls. This surface scratching would reveal the solid brick texture of the original wall with all the wounds suffered over time (passage of wiring, pieces of wood from old carpentry and tying elements). Finally, the cutting and emptying of the walls was carried out in such a way that the wall continued to work structurally while achieving the desired continuity and communication between spaces. This unique structural support was made with curved metal pieces laser cut and cable-stayed in the lower floor.
The result: a ceramic "patchwork" of time, traces and textures through a succession of arcs that connect and disconnect at the same time allowing the spatial prolongation the arrival of light coming from the courtyards and the Darrillo de la Magdalena street. The plaster ceiling was also dismantled to reveal the original wooden elements that made up the structure of the floor.
