Urban Villa

Imagen Subliminal

• Architects

GARCIAGERMAN ARQUITECTOS completes Urban Villa, a residential building in northern Madrid that reconsiders the typology of bourgeois urban villa within the constraints of a protected garden district, reinterpreting mid-century modern classicism through symmetry, section, and restraint.

Located near the historic Colonia Residencia, one of Madrid’s most distinctive early 20th-century gardencity enclaves, a new residential project by GARCIAGERMAN ARQUITECTOS replaces a pre-existing structure, strictly adhering to its original volume as required by planning regulations. Within this fixed envelope, the architects develop a precise and layered spatial sequence that redefines the relationship between domestic life, landscape, and urban context.

photo_credit Imagen Subliminal — Imagen Subliminal

Urban Villa is composed as a symmetrical pair of twin dwellings, whose combined figure assumes the presence of a single, larger villa. This formal strategy, at once pragmatic and compositional, recalls a lineage of mid- 20th-century Madrid architects such as Rafael Bergamín, Luis Gutiérrez Soto, Miguel Oriol, and José María Toledo, whose work has often been described as a form of restrained modern classicism: an architecture capable of reconciling order and discretion with a measured openness to modern life.

Within this framework, Urban Villa unfolds vertically. The lower levels are partially excavated, enclosed by vegetation and water, and assume a more introverted character. Above, the intermediate floors accommodate the private domestic realm, positioned in close proximity to the surrounding trees. At the top, a roof garden opens outward, establishing a distant visual dialogue with Madrid’s contemporary skyline. This sectional progression — from enclosure to exposure — organizes the project more decisively than its external form, which remains deliberately compact and controlled. The architecture resists overt expression, instead relying on proportion, repetition, and material consistency to construct its identity.

The façades are clad in two types of natural limestone, arranged within a ventilated rainscreen system over wood-fibre insulation. The result is a surface that appears at once monolithic and finely articulated, where depth is achieved through subtle variation rather than contrast. Environmental performance is addressed through a combination of passive strategies — compact form, shading, planting — and active systems, including geothermal heating and cooling.

If the project engages with historical references, it does so without nostalgia. Symmetry, mass, and scale — traditionally associated with permanence and representation — are here recalibrated to support a contemporary domestic condition defined by proximity to landscape, environmental awareness, and spatial continuity.