The Dalias architectural project, located in the west of Cuenca was originally planned and built in 1986 with that “traditional house” typology with those sets of roofs and windows of the first shelter that teach you to draw in the school, and where the houses of the environment they maintain this typology. The house is attached to its sides and back, so it did not have much natural lighting, even less visual, a three-meter frontal retreat with the option of a single parking lot, the structure of the house is made of reinforced concrete in beams and columns, the mezzanine and roof slabs were structured in wood, the first one covered with staves and the second one with corrugated fiber cement plates.
The new owner had as a particular requirement to have space for two vehicles, which would occupy a considerable area of the ground floor, for this reason its structural part would not serve to hold so much air, the precision in the use of technical means led to decisions more than design, configurations rather than figurations, the result of removing and discovering will be open and unforeseen a process of digging, weightless, deep mysterious, an architectural archeology
“Take out to put space”
We used a metal implant, which would reinforce the tibia (wooden structure) that will raise the private area to the shoulders where the only modification was to divide into two bathrooms where the previous one was, we conserved the stairs and the backyard where the laundry was and an access to the cellar that was in the basement and that, at present, is the dining room, the kitchen, the laundry and the garden, the room floats on metal beams with wooden strips recovering the memory of the place and a being where it was previously the kitchen preserving the pottery.
We repeat the emptiness from the patio to the interior to separate the room from the parking lot and insert the new circulation to the basement. When parking is not used, it is integrated with the life of the interior, blurring both spaces, allowing that “unpredictability of life” to be protected, generating opportunities for opportunities extending the territory.
The shredding of the roof structure and slabs allowed to generate a kind of crack by cutting the house in two parts allowing the entry of natural lighting from the roof through a row of glass, filtering by wooden staves that are separated (pergola type) on the slab of the first high floor allowing to observe at noon the sun's rays on the ground floor similar to the light that crosses a tree.
We eliminate the representation on the facade by limiting visuals to and from the interior, erasing eaves, canals and removing paint until we reach the origin of what the intervention is asking for, embedded concrete and metal pieces fighting gravity.
The confined, dark and cold spaces planned more than 30 years ago were updated integrating that desire for freedom and relationship with natural agents, it was like digging in a mine, taking out the material and gaining air surrounded only by empty cliffs.
