Garcia-Sauret House
Originally, we encountered a single-story building from 1940. It had generous height and a courtyard overtaken by ruined volumes. The structure featured an intriguing brick construction with large blocks, a protected facade with modernist echoes, and a south-facing wall that was blind, with no openings, underutilized, and treated as if it were a party wall, even though it faced the street.
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We relocated the main entrance and eliminated the outdated, traditional two-sided layout, reorganizing the space around a central plan focused on the courtyard. We prioritized maximizing natural light from all the favorable orientations. The thermal inertia of the floor is harnessed to capture energy in winter, and solar control strategies are implemented for the summer, including double ventilation layers, light wells, and heat exhaust systems. The house, much like a clock, intensely experiences the changing seasons and weather throughout both the year and the day.
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The south-facing facade has been opened and consolidated, with an aesthetic effort to unify all the adjacent facades. We neither replicated the old facade nor worked with contrast, but instead used a coherent language that facilitates the integration of the new house into the neighborhood, with proposals that are legible and somewhat optimistic.
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The annexed space, designed as a maturation area for a young person; the active, wild, and colorful courtyard; and the double-height area, offering comfort and varying levels of privacy—these are all part of a collective project carried out together with the family to ensure the house truly becomes theirs.
