The latest house by H Arquitectes is an open infrastructure

House 1219 is the latest housing building by Barcelona-based studio H Arquitectes. On a plot without salient features, the project took as starting point the restrictions marked by the geotechnical study, which showed that the first meters underground had a low resistance capacity. To avoid a deep foundation, not recommendable for both economic and environmental reasons, it was necessary to reanalyze the organization of the house and its building systems.

The program is distributed in ten equal spaces of 3.5 x 5.12 meters. The versatility of these 18 square meters and the generous relationships between them offers, surprisingly, great freedom and allows imagining that the house can be used in very different ways over the years, creating rooms that can be independent or used as a single space. The brick architecture pursued was one that responds to the minimum and basic needs, avoiding superfluous elements, but that allows at the same time a maximum potential of uses. The house is just an infrastructure where the users can choose the best way to make it their own. The solar protection reproduces the interior grid with a vegetal protection organized like small chapels, creating a threshold that will prevent the summer sun from overheating the house, minimizing the visual impact of the construction, which will blend with the garden. House and garden would want to be one same thing, to live using the whole plot.