In Barcelona, Arquitectura-G has built a family home whose front and rear sides could hardly be more different. While it is completely closed off from the street, it appears to consist of a multi-storey loggia facing the garden courtyard.
In Barcelona, Arquitectura-G has built a family home whose front and rear sides could hardly be more different. While it is completely closed off from the street, it appears to consist of a multi-storey loggia facing the garden courtyard.
Their aim was to create “a habitable loggia around a patio garden”, say the architects from Arquitectura-G from Barcelona. Their Casa Costa appears to consist of nothing more than a street façade and balconies behind it. The Catalan architects describe their intention when building the house as “interior spaces that want to be exterior spaces”.
The bare concrete floors, ceilings and pillars, the spiral staircase made of prefabricated concrete elements – inside the building, they contribute to the impression of being in an outdoor space. The large awnings made of tarpaulin, which are pulled in front of the open floors on the patio side, seem to be the only protection from the weather. Of course, that’s not true. But the floor-to-ceiling window elements made of unpainted aluminum can be pushed all the way to the side. With the longer sash of the L-shaped floor plan, this means that four window elements are pushed on top of each other.
The floor plan is not deeper than one room at any point, so that when the window walls on the two floors are pushed aside, almost the entire house becomes a loggia. Only two bathrooms, the vestibule and a room located in the corner of the two wings of the building are still separate rooms. One of the bathrooms and the room each receive light through a window in the street façade. A further window illuminates the lowest room on the upper floor from a second side.
The façade itself is a complete contrast to the loggia-like garden side of Casa Costa. On the one hand, because the architects have designed a kind of archetypal house façade here. The perforated façade forms a door opening on the first floor and two high rectangular window openings on the upper floor. Secondly, because it is almost forbidding. The shutters in front of the windows are unadorned metal plates on hinges. Like the front door, they lie flat in the wall surface when closed. The fanlight above the front door can also be covered by a flap. Last but not least, the uniform off-white tone of the plaster, shutters and door creates an extremely cohesive and monochrome appearance.
Typologically, Casa Costa follows the tradition of the patio house, which is widespread in Spain. Here, however, the architects have interpreted the inner courtyard as a garden with trees and bushes. This is why it does not form the communicative center of the house, but rather shields the back of the house with its loggia character. At the same time, the vegetation provides shade and prevents the heat from building up in the courtyard. The fact that the patio is not located in the center of the building fits in with this concept. It has been moved to one of the rear corners of the plot and is bordered on two sides by the two wings of the house.
In addition to the garden courtyard, Casa Costa has a further open space. Almost the entire roof area is designed as a terrace. The spiral staircase, which also connects the lower floors, ends in a small pavilion. Unlike the garden courtyard, the architects wanted to create an open-air living space here. They therefore planned an open-air kitchen with a water connection directly behind the street façade, which completely shields the roof terrace.
While the architects can protect the rear loggia from the sun through the greenery of the garden courtyard, the street façade lacks this protection. For this reason, Arquitectura-G also resorts to southern European practice here and closes off this side of the house as far as possible, as shown. The white exterior color also prevents excessive heating from the sun’s rays. These measures make artificial air conditioning superfluous.
Basically, the architects are adapting the centuries-old building methods that have developed from the climatic conditions of the Iberian Peninsula. However, thanks to modern construction techniques, they are able to take the idea of a house open to the courtyard much further than was possible with pre-modern construction methods.
A villa by José Francisco García-Sánchez in Andalusia responds to the blazing Spanish sun in a similarly radical yet completely different way.
