Refurbishment and division into two apartments of a house in Madrid (built)
Madrid (Spain) / 2012
Collaborator: Claudia Mainardi
Following contemporary social trends and real state dynamics, the owners of a big apartment in the center of Madrid decided to divide it into two smaller units for the reduced requirements of their two daughters. A different arrangement of rooms around common spaces is proposed for each case, in an exploration of architecture's participation in the configuration of the social dynamics of diverse domesticities. The corridor is explored as a the main technology mediating these dynamics, following the two main narratives associated to it: corridor as the technology of privacy (Evans) or as one leading to different forms of socialization (Jarzombek). In one of the units it becomes a valve that makes access to each room independent from the others and from the living area, while maintaining a considerable width that allows it to become access, study room and kitchen. Inn the other, it disappears to become a common family/play room to which the different bedrooms open. Repeated visits to the house and consequent post occupancy evaluations have revealed how the dynamics internal to each unit (and between them) have taken different forms, both mobilizing the potential of the two distributions, and subverting them as well.
Perspectival floorplan and post-occupancy evaluations