Cubus Taller d’Arquitectura, Estel Ortega Vázquez and David Pou Van den Bossche
The project consisted of the reform and rehabilitation of an existing building into a new house. The town of Jafre offers residents and visitors the character of the traditional villages of the Baix Empordà: stone houses, thick walls, narrow and irregular streets ... A set in which the buildings blend into each other defining a characteristically silhouetted profile against the sky.
Despite admitting new buildings, the old town maintains its small size, and has managed to balance its growth without losing its identity. Contextualized within this framework, the project worked with two sides: from the inside, trying to counteract the excessive crushing of the previous distribution, but especially the lack of natural light of the existing space.
To achieve this, we proceeded to develop strategies for emptying the interior space by creating double heights that favored the creation of diagonal visuals, extending the perception of space, and allows to drop natural light into different units.
It was essential that these strategies could work from inside without altering the grain of the existing holes in the street facades, in order to gain the necessary light without having to define a new type of openings in the facade that would alter its harmony with the buildings that surround it, with which is in tune.
Thus, from outside the project aimed to strengthen the dialogue between the house and its immediate neighbors, redefining the kind of holes. In this urban tissue, fabric holes are a fundamental part of the identity of its buildings, offering a composition that apparently responds to its interior. Despite this supposed chaos, the lecture from the street offers a harmonious and balanced view with all buildings working in common as one.
To achieve this, the facades worked interpreting the traditional hole, playing with a double perimeter between the vacuum and the plaster that protects and defines lintel and jambs; also attended the relationship between the new window profile and stony surface. The entire construction was solved with traditional materials and vernacular techniques.
The result can confer a certain identity to the house, a contemporary character, without affecting its role within the group.
