Zuloaga Building
The project is located in a historic neighborhood of Granada wich emerged in the 1930s in order to respond to the need to expand the city. The new building, which occupies the plot of another pre-existing, seeks to close the block and weave the silhouette of the annexed buildings in order to give continuity to the pre-existing environment through a serene and sustainable intervention.
The intervetion is about the idea of coexisting yesterday with today. It’s about yesterday’s materials, in today’s times. It is about the idea of stopping time in the textures of then, the ingredients of always in a foreign time. It deals with the adaptation of tradition to the new times without ever losing its essence.
Basically, the program consists of three houses, in addition to a commercial premises on the ground floor and a methodically executed regulation.
Five floors above ground and one under it, which houses a space for storage rooms, constitute the building. A central communication center organizes the distribution of the site and in turn, arbitrates the boundaries between the different public and private areas of the building.
A total of three houses are distributed in the building, being organized one house per floor. The scheme of it is defined from two main axes that organize the space in a large day area and in a night space that contains the bedrooms.
At the intersection of these axes, articulating both spaces, the bathroom core is located. An open kitchen is the central element of the day space and in turn, the binding element of the house.
Some glass panels allow visual and light circulation between the bedrooms and between the bedrooms and the day space, thus blurring the encounters of the walls and allowing, from the inside, the complete visual of the boundaries of the plot.
On the upper floor, a neighboring terrace, interconnected with the rest of the spaces through the courtyard, crowns the building as a square for the community, a place of coexistence and contact with the outside environment.
The lime mortar of the facade, already present in the pre- existing housing, and the limestone of the interiors, materialize the finishes of the project. Both give a character able to integrate and dialogue with the place that yesterday was and with the current.
A simple geometry, coherent in the context and in order to answer the vital question of living.
In short, as if it were a volume that emerges from the earth, with simple lines and perforated for life that acquires movement in the sunlight.
