Continuous process
DOM house, located in the village of Los Pedrones, is half of a house built in the 1950s that was equitably split when inherited.
The main façade, facing the road, consists of typical representative elements of popular architecture. In contrast, the rear façade is related to the chapel, the Los Pedrones fountain and the nearby crops that are intertwined with the built fabric.
The back is arranged as a kind of pars rustica with patios and room for animals, tools and agricultural production. It was the place of the pigpen, the coop and the shed. The dirty, worthless and private day-to-day workplace.
Over the years, the house has undergone a series of transformations with the aim of solving specific needs at specific times, crystallizing a kind of built biography of the family.
These modifications were especially carried out in the rear of the house, adding roofings, extensions, new rooms and toilets. But the countryside underwent a radical change from the 1970s onwards, from subsistence agriculture to extensive agriculture and, as a consequence, these spaces gradually became outdated and underused.
Finally, and like so many other houses in emptied Spain, DOM house ceased to be an habitual residence and became the summer second home in the village.
The actions carried out seek to reconnect the inhabitant with the nearby landscape and with its latent community. The project is to continue transforming this house, as it has been done for 70 years.
Precise actions
The more informal exterior extensions were replaced by a light structure that sets off against the heaviness of the masonry wall. Almost like a scaffolding upon the façade, it is deep enough to become a room that extends the living room outwards.
The rear volumes, which used to block the lighting and the views towards the orchards and the chapel, were reduced in height and in surface. The slender pillars give unity to the patio, gaining light and spaciousness.
The location and shape of the bathrooms define the character of the floor plan. The bathroom on the ground floor is conceived as an articulation located in the connection among the house's floors. On the bedrooms’ floor, the bathroom is split into two to be integrated into a piece of furniture. And at the back porch, it is conceived as a living space and equipped with the typical elements of this type of space, such as a laundry area, a well and a small storage area.
The various interventions seek to interweave different layers of time and to emphasize the transmitted knowledge. But above all, they aim for the house to be used, for dinners with friends to be held, for birthdays to be celebrated and for the Domingo family to come more to town.
All creations are initially ad hoc combinations of past subsystems; “nothing can be created out of nothing”. [...] The man-made world is built up of fragments from the past.
Adhocism. 1972. Charles Jencks
