FAMILY DWELLING: SANT ANDREU DE LLAVANERES, BARCELONA
The challenge of designing a family dwelling, which had to be located on a steeply sloping plot, initially had to assume as a risk the decision regarding the level at which the floor that would be in contact with the ground was to be located. This created a situation of some ambiguity in terms of what this floor would be called, in order to describe it adequately: ground floor, entrance floor, base floor, etc. This need for semantic precision when it came to defining the building’s different floors was a crucial aspect in the definition of the uses and programs for the dwelling as a whole.
In this case the decision was made to locate the house considerably below the highest level reached by the plot, right at the level of the entrance, and to physically “hang it” over the slope, in order to mark out its meeting with the terrain at level half way up the plot.
The house appears as a simple wooden wall, a little under 3 metres in height at the entrance, with the only visible element being a glass cube that frames this entrance. On the other side of the wall the house appears, as if “hanging” on the slope.
Conceived as a large block of white limestone with a series of voids and volumes sculpted into its mass the house develops its functional program on three floors. The front entrance is on the top floor, along with a garage and the main suite. The middle floor, a diaphanous space, is centred on a glazed volume that contains a bathroom, with a double space projecting out over the living room and garden via large plate-glass windows. The bottom floor connects up to the garden, which defines the exterior setting of the dwelling, and contains the kitchen plus an open plan living/dining room that is clearly focused on its connection with the exterior ambience of the garden.
A brise-soleil style pergola establishes a porch space that also acts as a filter to the garden creating, by means of a smooth gesture, an impression that the dwelling is slightly raised off the ground, providing a sense of visual ascendency and weightlessness that serve to accentuate its spatial quality.
The sense of space in the garden, with its large swimming pool located along the perimeter, in contact with the slope and the embankment, has been taken to the limit in order to intensify the sensation that it projects out over the void of the sloping terrain.
The project of a “hanging” house can only be fully appreciated from a distance and yet, when seen from close up, disappears behind a simple wall that avoids any intuition as to what is taking place on the other side
