House 1302

The current construction is a dwelling, which was maintained in an acceptable state of its constructive and structural elements, but needed an intervention regarding the new necessities of the clients.
A main body in the floor plan and the first floor composes the house. Afterwards, some auxiliary constructions were added, with less spatial and constructive quality.

In the main body, the party walls act as the bearing walls and the floors are made out of wooden ceiling beans and terracotta tiles. The ceiling on the ground floor slightly deflects in the points where it is free of interior partitions. The roof was not in a bad condition, although, as well as the rest of the construction, needed some improvements including its thermic behaviour.

The intervention proposed to demolish the auxiliary bodies and empty the main body leaving only the structure that would be repaired, always maintaining its textures and material qualities, taking part of the new identity of the dwelling. The staircase of the existing building was kept in the same position as it was before but enlarged up to the size of 90cm.

Inside this container, three new wooden constructions would appear to organize the space and the new program. One of the boxes divides the ground floor in two big rooms: a hall-office and the kitchen. Inside the box, are solved the secondary programs (such as bathroom and pantry).

Perpendicular to the volume in the ground floor, we find in the first floor, a second elongated box that solves the program of rooms, closet and bathroom, leaving a spacious corridor in a double space height, which will be used as a place to relax or a playground. As well as acting as a space-organizer, this box helps structural reinforcement, as a large beam, which connected to the existing ones, would correct the existing deflection.

The third wooden box is an ancillary construction detached at the garden façade and of low depth, creating a large gallery like a living room, which, thanks to its glass façade, improves the visual connection between the house and the exterior, as the same time as the solar caption. A vegetable pergola is constructed in front of it as a prevention from solar radiation during the summer. Finally, a last construction would appear at the end of the garden to act as a storage room.

At the interior façade of the plot, in the first floor, a double polycarbonate façade is added until the maximum buildable depth is reached, working as a Trombe wall during the winter, which helps to passively acclimatize the house. During the summer, this double skin is connected to a double roof. Only by opening an inferior window at the Trombe wall, and some voids at the roof, a vertical convection is created, which naturally eliminates any excess heat.

During the year, those voids should be regulated to guarantee the best passive behaviour of the building. The accumulated heat at the double skin, when the windows are closed, was taken in advantage by being connected to the ACS and the house heating. This atypical arrangement of the heat pump with the air intake of the double skin of the roof and the extraction outside the building, allows the heat pump to be used as a recuperator of the residual heat of the air renovations of the house.

To encourage the solar captions from the West, some Velux windows were installed at the roof, which at the same time, would give natural light to the double height space at the first floor and the entrance-office. The passive strategy of the house is complemented by adding some thermic isolation to the different constructive solutions added to the existing. Always having as a priority to reinforce the thermic inertia in the house. In this way, there are so important the new interior finishing of the new wooden boxes as of the pre-existing construction (ceramics, hydraulic floor tiles, bearing walls, etc.), giving a large thermic inertia and summer comfort.