House F

David Rodríguez

• Architects

In the center of Telde, in Gran Canaria, is the historic neighborhood of San Francisco. This urban oasis, crossed by a network of irregular and narrow cobbled streets, presents a fabric that is defined by old houses between party walls, giving shape to long white walls, barely interrupted by the wooden carpentry of the hollows of the facades of the dwellings.

photo_credit David Rodríguez — David Rodríguez

House F occupies one of the few empty plots in the area, located next to an orange grove protected behind a long whitewashed wall, of course, white.

The regulations of the area, of a marked protectionist nature, establish strict conditions that push for a solution of mimesis with what exists for the new architecture, determining in an almost mathematical way the position, size and proportion of the openings of the main façade.

This is where the debate around the project arises. The proposal is faced from the understanding that the environment has a series of invariables that must be respected, but from here the new architecture must manifest its own time and place, since only in this way is the history of the urban context.

In this way, the project is based on the gaps in the norm to present a radically white canvas, a deliberately austere house that sometimes opens onto the neighborhood, but other times prefers to be a wall, like the neighboring farm.

Once inside, the house is compositionally free, evidencing this condition in the rear facade.

House F is the result of a deep reflection on the idea of inhabiting and the multiple domestic scenarios that the architectural project can favor. A house for a couple in which users can decide to participate or not in the public life of the neighborhood, opening or closing to the environment. Housing and shelter.

In its functional scheme, the house is organized around two generated voids: a central courtyard to which the staircase and rooms open, and another at the back of the plot, which frees up a large area for a south-facing garden. This allows an interior world to be created in which the spaces gravitate around the two voids, promoting visual relationships at the different levels, and being able to integrate the exterior rooms as part of the house.

As for the uses, only those strictly necessary to solve the housing program are defined. Otherwise, the rooms have no defined function, presenting themselves as reversible spaces of different scales that can look outside, inside or both.

The concise palette of finishes moves in a balance of contrasts between cold and warm materials: concrete floors and ceilings, white walls and natural pine wood. The result, a sober environment that intends to be colonized by its inhabitants, and that will only be home when this happens.