P 2203
type
use
client
location
size
budget
year
status
heritage, rehabilitation
residential
private
riudaura, girona
120m2
tbc
2022tbc
ongoing
Architecture is a process. A very long
one in fact. This process is never straightforward and it continuously moves
back and forth, involving a rich yet complex net of stakeholders: from clients,
investors, lawyers, to public workers, engineers, architects, and
end-users. But not
only — it also involves changes in the program, misplaced structures, materials
on-site, and construction codes that do not accommodate the existing
conditions. As architects, we use to oversee this process to anticipate
construction, but eventually it is somehow uncertain. It is precisely through
this condition of uncertainty where architecture has the opportunity to explore
new formal languages and question pre-established notions of good design.
In 2022,
we were commissioned with refurbishing an old watermill from 14th century in
Catalonia’s rural northwest. Upon project acceptance, we found a house with its
interior fully demolished and partially reconstructed.
Due to the global
financial crisis, the property had remained in disrepair for years. The house had been reduced
to an empty shell; only four walls and a roof remain from its original state.
The interior stone walls had disappeared, replaced instead by a
new steel-frame structure and brick wall to support the newly renovated roof. The juxtaposition of these seemingly opposing construction systems is
unexpected from a rational perspective. However, they blend seamlessly with the
other exposed materials, accidentally shaping the character of the space.
But what truly
constitutes the ‘existing ‘ anymore? Is it relevant to differentiate between
the original and the new if the house has been drastically modified? Rather to
establish a criteria for determining what must stay and what must go, the
understanding of the house ‘as found’ might become a new language worth to
explore, a new strategy following a process already started. We understand the project
as a collection of diverse construction systems that are intricately
articulated to each other. Like surgical procedures that dissect the existing
structures and carefully complement and extend them.
This results in a sense of coherence and
differentiation, making it nearly impossible to distinguish between the several
interventions and the original construction.