JR Apartment
The refurbished home is located in a building from the 70s. Its original distribution, fragmented and hierarchical, constituted a complex accumulation of disproportionate rooms in a property where it's corridor left great spaces in the half-light. The access to its privileged views from the Segundo Ensanche's neighbourhood western limit, over Pamplona's Ciudadela, was the exclusive right of a bedroom.
The reality of the city, its presence, invents the home. The importance of the urban landscape in this place suggested the idea of extending this privilege to the rest of the home, of constructing a versatile space, as deep and luminous as possible. For this reason the limit of the private is "pushed" to the place where choosing the light of the block's patio is giving up to evidence. A gross limit is traced through containers that are disposed in a longitudinal way, respecting the continuity of common space and opening the dwelling to the city's light, landscape and sky.
The result is the organising of a new domestic space like a continuous unit of coexistence that reinforces the concepts of brightness, profundity and transparency, avoiding the appearance of any 'cul-de-sac.’
In this deep and luminous continuous, the home's activities are carried out without interruption. The emptying of space helps establish new relations between places and objects, between spaces and uses, between technology and inhabiting; and introduces alternative routes that provide versatility without the need for artifice.
The decision of acknowledging the potential of the inside area patio as an intermediate illuminating space, surpassing its previous condition of residual and service space, allows the dwelling to incorporate a new lateral facade, and also benefits with natural light the rooms situated further from the exterior.
The terrace is incorporated to the interior of the dwelling as its own extension and is added to the continuity of the proposed versatile space through generous dimensions oculus that frame the views and have the landscape and sky literally float inside the home.
A controlled palette of materials ( oak continuous flooring on the whole dwelling and white colour on the vertical elements) strengthens the special unity of the whole, defining a silent and luminous design strategy, from the main elements that conform the space to the small scale objects purposely designed. This serene and unitary formal language permits the handing over of prominence to the home and its dwellers.
