Its volume and openings fixed by regulation, a ruined hut in Santa Margarida de Montbui, near Barcelona, becomes a house anyway: ARQUITECTURA-G lowers the ground a metre and staggers the rooms around one heavy core.
Before it was a house, it was barely a building. On a flat, elongated plot of 7,000 square metres at the edge of Santa Margarida de Montbui stood an agricultural structure in ruin, in truth a hut under a fibre-cement roof. The building regulations read it differently. They classed it as a farmhouse, and the word came with conditions: no change to the volume, none to the openings in the facade. The brief asked for a single-family house. The rulebook asked for the hut's exact silhouette. A category on paper outranked the evidence on the ground, and every decision that follows starts from that mismatch.
The first problem is the threshold. The old shed, the studio writes, met its surroundings "without preamble in the transition from the field to the interior." Farm buildings can live like that; a family house wants an edge, a smaller and more sheltered patch of ground between the door and the open plain. With the walls fixed in place, the ground moves instead. The land around the house is dug out by one metre, down to the level of a terrace that becomes the main access and links the plot to the rest of the urbanisation. What results is a made landscape, a lowered platform that serves as the main meeting ground of inside and outside.
Inside, the house gives up on floors in the ordinary sense. Its programme unfolds over staggered platforms set around a central load-bearing core that works as one large pillar, holding the services and the stairs and tying the living spaces together. Its position does structural work too. Because the core sits in the middle, the steel slabs reach across shorter spans and can be thinner, and that saving turns into the governing idea of the whole house, a contrast between "the massiveness of what supports and the lightness of what is supported."
The finishes make that contrast legible by touch. The main load-bearing elements are left rough, heavy and coarse. Secondary elements and interior partitions are smoother and lighter, put up with light structural techniques, so the difference between what holds the house up and what merely divides it is something a hand registers before the eye does. Colour keeps the two halves of the system on speaking terms. The palette stays within earthy tones, chosen to relate to the surroundings, which lets a shell that was not allowed to change still answer to the plain outside its door.
Upward, the house becomes a climb. Mezzanines of varying height rise from the common areas to the bedrooms, and the sequence concludes on "a balcony that strikes out to the cereal fields." Read as a whole, the route reverses the opening move. The house sinks a metre to hold the open plain at arm's length, then spends its entire interior climbing back up to look at it.
