The renovation of a 50 m² apartment in a Neo-Mudéjar building over a century old, located in the Madrid neighborhood of Tetuán, stems from the need to transform a highly rigid and compartmentalized domestic space. Over time, successive layers of alterations, refurbishments, and modifications had accumulated, resulting in a loss of spatial clarity.

The project proposes a strategy of selective subtraction, clearing the spaces contained between the two load-bearing walls that define the structure of the dwelling, in order to reorganize the plan and establish new relationships more aligned with contemporary ways of living.

The fundamental strategy is the construction of a clear duality between public and private, between day and night. This is not merely a functional separation, but an atmospheric gradation. The day area is conceived as an open spatial sequence, where the entrance hall, kitchen, and living room are linked through deep visual connections, recalling the logic of the enfilade: rooms that are not closed off, but visually traversed, chaining perspectives and allowing light to travel through the apartment from the access gallery to the balconies on the main façade, two characteristic elements of Madrid’s Neo-Mudéjar residential architecture.

In contrast to this extroverted and fluid condition, the more private area withdraws. It is placed in a secondary, quieter plane, where the thickness of the boundaries gains greater presence. Here, architecture ceases to be sequence and becomes refuge.

The project operates through the tension between continuity and limit, between the inherited and the contemporary. The original elements—proportions, heights, structural rhythms—are understood as a latent system that orders the intervention. The new layout reveals the load-bearing wall structure that supports the building, cutting through it where necessary and closing it off when required by the program, thereby intensifying its presence and thickness. The new interventions do not imitate the past; they distinguish themselves with precision, introducing a recognizable temporal layer.

The proposal reconstructs domestic space as an experience. A dwelling understood not as a sum of rooms, but as a system of relationships—visual, luminous, and programmatic. A space where movement and vision organize form, and where each transition, rather than separating, articulates. To inhabit the dwelling is also to re-inhabit the building that contains it, reactivating—through contemporary means—the spatial and constructive logics of an architectural style that has gradually fallen into oblivion, restoring its relevance through use.