Two-phase housing

Modular housing

The two-phase house in Zuera was a challenge for us to combine the traditional with the contemporary, adding a backbone.

Client: Silvia and Miguel
Surface area: 231 m2
Status: Completed
Timeline: 2019
Location: Zaragoza
Type of project: Modular housing

Two-phase housing is based on the idea of generating a home built in two phases or CRONOS located in the same TOPOS. Silvia and Miguel, from Zuera, a town near Zaragoza, decided to put down their roots in the town where they were born and raised, and they wanted to do so, remembering that tradition while at the same time not wanting to lose the comforts that a state-of-the-art home could offer them. In this way the project is born of a duality that combines the mass of the vernacular and traditional load-bearing walls with the lightness of its metallic structure, which is presented as a compliment to technology.

The façade also represents this duality in the two-phase housing project. In it we find a lattice of nine meters high and integrates both electricity and water, meters and also the intercom to enter the house. That belongs to the technological part, while the traditional part is represented by that stone and that balcony, which is the only thing that gives scale to the house.

The site was only 7m wide, facing one of the main streets of the historic center, and 30m deep, which led us to be radical and show the duality of the project, dialoguing longitudinally between the traditional and the contemporary.

The housing project is articulated by a backbone, which runs from side to side of the house, in which a courtyard, with another courtyard and even a third courtyard, which alternate longitudinally in the house as a zigzag that appears and disappears in the living of the traditional and contemporary houses. We start with a patio that faces the facade and is shown as the most technological representation of the house with a lattice of vertical louvers in two frequencies. The second courtyard, which is on the other side of the staircase from the spine, is where tradition is represented by an orange tree, a terracotta finish and a restrained dimension of holes. The final courtyard is also divided into two sections; the vegetable, being the most contemporary part on which overturns the large opening of the kitchen and the part where the terracotta appears again, as a more vernacular part.

This project discourse appears on both floors, translating into the same thing: the technological part is where all the services are, the machines… And the traditional part is where the rooms are mainly located, such as the living room, which is in the vernacular area, and is where those arches were born, which in the end remind us of the Aragonese vault of centuries ago.

The room of Paula, Miguel and Silvia’s daughter, is the only room facing the street and the only window directly facing the outside space. In the end it is a balcony that is tucked into a stone facade. The particularity of this room is that it has a double height, where paula studies downstairs and sleeps upstairs. Upstairs, on its exclusive floor, it has a recreation area where you can play, read and take out a second bed. While downstairs, which is where it has direct light, it is a space for concentration and study.

Regarding Miguel and Silvia’s room, the deck goes up and down, and that helps to differentiate two rooms within the same room, and it does so right above their bed. On the other side, there is a transition to the en-suite bathroom, which passes through the dressing room and a laundry area. Particularly in this case, as the family unit are 3, we decided that the laundry was in that room transition, connected to the interior terrace and more privative.

Bathrooms are always an opportunity towards a more intimate world. Paula’s scenography, being a pre-adolescent girl, is the most aseptic, she will take her condition with the little things that Paula puts on her.

The service bathroom on the first floor has a very strong personality, it wants to be very theatrical and really make an impact on the guest. Their bathroom is “they”, and it has stone, it has a minimal lower recess that somehow emulates the minimal and vernacular recesses of the bathrooms of our grandparents.

With respect to the kitchen of the house, there is that question that we always have with the clients, of separate kitchen or together. Well, this kitchen has both together. At the end, there is a kitchen module, which is a piece of furniture that separates the kitchen from the living room, but from this module there are also two doors, which do not have any guide, and are perfectly hidden. When those doors are open, “the curtain opens”, and that kitchen is totally a dependent room of that living room, of that life as a whole.

The staircase is between the two worlds, the technological world of steel and the more traditional world of wood. It is a very special staircase that practically flies, and in a space as narrow as the hallway, it practically disappears.

The house is highly efficient, has a system attentive to its environment; complemented by an aerothermal system with underfloor heating and mechanical ventilation. In addition, the trellises and sunshades that we have designed in all the patios help to make it more efficient and the incidence of the sun changes throughout the day.