House in Soto del Real

The work was about projecting a familiar dwelling of a conventional programming, destined to a couple with two children, in a typical residential area of the Madrid mountain range, an environment without qualification. In this sense we decided to give a recognizable piece to this disorganized, or better said heterogeneous, area of suburbia without any architectural interest. As Moreno Galván wrote: "Buildings are created with a particular purpose. But architecture is made from a situation, an understanding of things, an image of the world."

The scale of the building, as well as the impossibility of purposing spaces of a public character that generated relations between themselves, made us direct our proposal towards the design of a piece with a strong geometric presence, self-absorbed, able to affirm its presence versus the heterogeneous  residential nonsense  of the surroundings.

Its strict geometry, meant in terms of clear organization, serves for designing precise and pure bodies, creating an absolute entity. The architecture proposed, far from presumptuous formalities and unreachable utopias, tries to be coherent with its final image, without losing the human dimension that will relate it with its inhabitants. We look for an architectural schematic plain unit.

The practice takes us to specify the design of the floor in an austere building, a simple programming solved in a realistic way. The building has a basement, a first and a second level. The constructive and typological clearness of the project becomes its main virtue. At the same time the implantation and the volume of the whole are solved with a great economy of resources. In the same way, the homogeneity of the materials that have been used, the simplicity of the facades composition and the distributive grouping of the services, contribute to define the simple, but effective,  enforcement of the building.

The interior distribution of this developed type of housing gets solved by optimizing the surface of every habitable piece, grouping the sanitary cores  and eliminating as much as possible the waste of  space in hallways and vestibules. This sanitary fixed core facilitates the possibility of varying and/or amplifying some pieces of the house, suppressing the partition walls. Because of this, it has been chosen a structural system of slabs on there in forced concrete walls ad pillars. The direct communications between the different adjacent rooms provide flexibility to the use of the house, allowing multiple relations and circulations between each other. A patio allows the access, as well as the illumination and the direct ventilation, of the basement. The first level advances as a cantilever bridge above the patio, acting as a roof, collaborating with the definition of its limits, qualifying it as one more room.

The design of the exterior areas constitutes a prior preoccupation in our proposal. Its design takes care of itself specially: we understand that in these, which are the common area of the habitat, the neighborhood relations will be developed and we want to promote them. Despite the typological restrictions imposed by the regulations, the programming and the budget, the abstraction has been chosen as the compositional strategy in the elevations.

Alberich-Rodríguez Arquitectos
Emilio Rodríguez, Francisco Domouso