In the garden of a family home in Olot, Girona, Jordi Hidalgo Tané sets Prefab Pavilion Facing a Centuries-Old Cedar, a 120 m2 room of prefabricated concrete built like the industrial buildings nearby.
On the edge of Olot, in a residential neighbourhood that backs onto a large industrial park, a small pavilion stands in the garden of a family home. It sits directly before a centuries-old cedar, and almost everything about it was settled before the first line was drawn. Municipal regulations fixed its position and its volume, a geobiological study set the internal layout, and the construction system followed from what the budget and the calendar would allow, which proved the most consequential constraint of all.
The response borrows from the neighbours. Rather than turn away from the industrial park, Jordi Hidalgo Tané built to the same logic as the buildings beyond the fence, an industrialised system of prefabricated concrete, then reduced it to the scale of a single household. The possibilities of the prefabricated system are pushed as far as they will go, with particular care given to the corner junctions, the panel assemblies and the surface finishes of the concrete.
From outside the volume reads as light, almost weightless, a grey box among the pitched roofs of its neighbours. Inside, the register inverts. The pavilion turns dense and profound, its concrete surfaces holding the room in shadow while daylight enters filtered through the texture of the material itself. A long window and an opening overhead are aimed at the same thing, framing the cedar and the garden so the tree the building was made to face is never out of view.
The economy of the approach shows in the numbers. On a budget of 150,000 euro, the pavilion was designed and manufactured in a workshop over six months, assembled on site in five days, and occupied three months later. At 120 m2 it is a small building that still manages to unsettle a few conventions, taking a system tied to industrial building and lending it to a garden room made to keep company with an old tree.
