Architects:Arqxé arquitectura

Area :2206 ft²

Year :2022

Photographs :Ivan Casal Nieto

Lead Architects :Jorge Enríquez Méndez and Adrián Pinaque Alvite

Program / Use / Building Function : Residential architecture - House

Country : Spain

A Casa dos Profesores (the Teachers’ House) brings us back to the past, to the emotions and memories that vanished in the blink of an eye after the explosion that occurred on May 23, 2018. In that journey, architecture must provide, once again, the foundations and the necessary tools to assist and collaborate with the individuals who live there in the reconstruction of the site and, above all, of their memory.

Originally, the plot had a single-family home consisting of a set of volumes with different heights and materials. These volumes were attached to each other or linked to each other through covered outdoor spaces.

The project’s proposal aims at maintaining the relationship between the old volumes that were part of the original site, and that allowed the creation of secondary spaces and rooms. Thus, the idea of ​​rearranging the 3 original volumes (the two houses and the cellar) was born, sewing them together through other lower volumes and creating a direct relationship between served spaces and serving spaces.

With the aim of formalizing the archetype of the house, the original idea was based around the stone walls of the old house, which would create a solid foundation on which lighter bodies made of wood could rest. However, due to the poor state of conservation of the walls, a clad masonry wall was added to the structure in order to create a continuous, solid, and massive base. The cellar, which will be resolved at a later stage, will maintain the original stone base that was intended for the house.

The new house comprises several volumes with gabled roofs and a continuous wooden envelope that dominates the new set while seeking lightness and verticality.

From a functional perspective, the volumes are tied together by flat and lower elements which serve the main spaces under the gabled roofs. Due to the rocky composition of the terrain, the excavation became complex and expensive, which is why only the two heights in the southern volume are maintained, allowing the creation of a raised space for the master bedroom and the study and reading space that also functions as a viewpoint. Under that space, there are two bedrooms which are directly connected to the garden.

This project is surrounded by other single-family homes, most of them recently rebuilt, farmland, and large trees, in a natural and “neo-rural” environment. With our approach, an attempt is made to show that there is an alternative to understanding rural architecture and that there are other ways of projecting and generating new identities, resorting to traditional ways of building and the use of traditional materials with contemporary applications.

A Casa dos Profesores arises from a small surface-contained single-family housing project, which seeks to unify the traditional identity of the past with the contemporary image of the present through the creation of pure primitive volumes and continuous and natural materiality.