1. DESCRIPTION OF PURPOSE
Along the years many high standing residences of the XIXth Century expansion of Madrid have been modified to convert some rooms with little use into independent small apartments with minimal surface and optimum situation. In this case it is a 35 m2
wine cellars which was adjacent to the kitchen of one of these residences which was bought by our client about thirty years ago and which had to be reformed.
The existing distribution, composed of compartments and opaque, divides the apartment into 4 spaces (bedroom, living room kitchen and bathroom), all of them very small. The storing space was minimum and comfort and natural light were rather
scarce since every space is associated to a single aluminum window and balcony with a reduced surface and low thermal insulation.
Moreover the interior location of the bathroom requires two floor levels in the apartment to hide the sanitation tubes and this fact is an obstacle inside an apartment with so reduced dimensions. With these starting conditions, the client transmits to us the necessity of changing the way of occupying the space since she is upset with such a “small apartment”. The concept of the “minimal residence” has been a recurrent topic for consideration in architecture along XX and XXI Centuries. In our case this is a basic condition; it is not an exercise of fencing or a pose, it is a fight for every available single
square meter in an apartment in the centre of Madrid. We are convinced that a small apartment cannot be a reduced large apartment since the scaling would always remind us that it is not what we would want it to be, the lost dimensions, the complex of inferiority with respect to a “real apartment”.
As mentioned before, the apartment has 35 m2 (actually 30 m2 after taking into account the corridor). The 30 m2 are a large surface for a living room, excessive for a bedroom and unbelievable for a kitchen. They may be considered as a luxury since they are very unusual for such purposes. Then we reached the conclusion that the basic working modulus, the minimum common denominator, should be the complete surface, the 30 m2 which can be compared to other larger apartments with pride. 30 m2 for a living room, 30 m2 for a bedroom, 30 m2 for a kitchen, 30 m2 for a bathroom, 30 m2 for a dressing room , or 30 m2 for a dancing room, a movie room or a playing room… 30 m2 for 30 diverse uses, an apartment of 30 times 30 m2 , the world inside a bottle.
Ultimately, the goal is to recover the initial void, the concept of a unique room and to understand that a very small apartment may be a very large suite.
This “tabula rasa” has obvious immediate benefits since it recovers an ordered and coherent space, very frequent in Madrid with three narrow balconies, regularly spaced, whose substitution by modern and more slender frames will provide more light
into the room. Nevertheless this is not the only argument since the designer should avoid falling into the cliché of removing all the walls in any apartment reform. Everyday life requires a correct hierarchical organization of spaces and a voided space is not a residence even if it may seem attractive.
Nevertheless void may be “qualified” by including service spaces to complement and to allow the usual domestic tasks. These service elements, such as lockers, kitchen, fold-away bed, closet, shower or bathroom, bookshelves, curtains or heaters shall
be located strategically and orderly along the contour of the room by playing with the different thickness of the walls and building a uniform surface by means of wood panels to unify the whole utilities in a single space. These panels are organized in two levels: the first one, made out of wood, reaches a 2.40 m height above the floor, a more domestic dimension, while the second one from 2.40 to 3.55 m height, made out of white panels, hides a number of storing spaces and other installations for occasional use.
This concept of perimetral server space, or packed space, is known since the XVIIIth Century as “poché” and it is the same which is used by the automobile industry (at a different scale) to locate the engine, the trunk, the glove box or the cabin instruments. The resulting space is what we will call the “technified void”. It is an abstract void in which even the handles will be reduced to simple leather bands to avoid giving hints about the function of every one of these panels. Once the duality between central void and technical perimetral density has been solved, the furniture has to be organized in
the most versatile way. It has to allow the diversity of functions (almost 30!) and, consequently, it consists of light elements which may be easily moved and stacked which make it possible to use the whole space without elements anchored to a fixed
position.
A residence kept in the wall and a space to dance… the best home in the world!
