Articles by Valeria Silva

‘House behind a wall’ is a project resolved based on the initial condition of providing an opaque response to its relationship with the public thoroughfare capable of allowing greater privacy for users and a more comfortable internal operation without the need to be conditioned by what happens outside. The absence of a hole in the facade implies creating our own tools to resolve the organization of the program and resolve with the same construction what was eliminated by the starting premise.

The design idea was to keep the volume but colour everything black. The owners showed us the single-family home they had just bought, on the outskirts of Sant Cugat, built in 2010, nondescript and with little aesthetic appeal; the vertical faces were exposed brick in ochre tones and all other elements featured different grey tones and finishes.

The project is a response to the idea of​​ inhabiting small spaces. It is a 58m2 cabin in the Andean area that allows lone passengers, couples or even couples with a first child to stay.

The house proposes a way of living that starts from a continuous dialogue with the landscape in which it is located. An irregular terrain at the end of a closed street, merging in some portion, to the semicircle of the roundabout that completes the residential area where TOMM House stars with its powerful personality of right angles. It is a Volume contiguous to a green area that belongs to the city. This green area is the trigger that determines the orientation. The street front is totally blind and leaves its main opening to the northeast. The order is for a family of 3 inhabitants with a priority; establish a permanent conversation with the vegetation that is what guarantees the outdoors, without neglecting privacy. The highest percentage of the garden area that the polygon of the land allowed us was achieved, being the juncture between the habitable and the area donated for a park, attesting to this constant relationship of views to the horizon.