Casa 1736 / H ARQUITECTES

Architects: H ARQUITECTES
Area: 631 m²
Year: 2023
Photography: Adrià Goula
Architects: David Lorente, Josep Ricart, Xavier Ros, Roger Tudó
Collaborators: Miquel Arias, Maya Torres, Maria Ferré, Albert Ferraz
Structure: DSM Arquitectes
Installations: M7 Enginyers
Technical Architects: Carles Bou
Program / Use / Building Function: Residential
City: Barcelona
Country: Spain

Casa 1736, designed by H ARQUITECTES, is a family home located in the dense urban area of Barcelona, Spain. Designed for a family of 5 or 6, the house retains the protected street facade of the existing building and creates a light-filled, ventilated interior centered around an atrium. Completed in 2024, this project prioritizes natural light and ventilation while addressing the challenges of urban density.

Casa 1736 is a house in the middle of the city for a family of five or six members. Despite its wide and long plot, it is surrounded by other buildings, creating the pressure of a big city. The existing building’s street façade will remain, as it is protected.

Regulations permit constructing a ground floor and two floors, meeting the client’s needs. However, the deep layout risks creating a dark and poorly ventilated interior.

The project addresses this by prioritizing the center, turning it into the best space in the house. This wide plot allows for an interior patio or atrium, making the center the house’s most representative space and enhancing the surrounding areas.

The center is converted into a space much more connected with the outside, full of light, with the ability to open up and ventilate the entire house. This intermediary space, although programmed and deeply architectural, lets in the natural intensity of the climate from the roof and divides the house in half, making it more spacious and breathable. Its height, light, and ventilation convey an outdoor feeling. The verticality of the central space and the zenith opening organize air and light, making the invisible visible by directing natural light to the bottom of the atrium and facilitating the upward exit of hot air.

The program organized around the central space is extensive and fragmented. A second categorization hierarchizes the program so each floor has four important, larger, and higher spaces, complemented by smaller, lower secondary spaces.

This hierarchy absorbs the plot’s irregularity, organizing spaces in a regular and orthogonal manner. Like excavated architecture, the thickness of the walls absorbs different spatial orientations.

Main pieces maintain the same position and dimension on all floors, while complementary pieces vary, adapting to and occupying the interstitial and irregular spaces between the main pieces. Large structural walls, thick and heavy, provide thermal stability. These walls are selectively hollowed to accommodate the smallest and most sensitive programs inside.

The great walls are built with “poor” cast-in-place concrete, a mixture with minimal cement and selected sands and gravels, compacted similarly to rammed earth. This robust and monolithic solution offers significant thermal inertia while remaining porous enough to regulate temperature, humidity, and acoustics.

The ceilings of the main spaces are as high as possible and made of wood to differentiate them from the complementary spaces, which are entirely mineral and excavated within the walls.

The central space, the most collective and special in the house, is an atrium on the ground and first floors, combined with a cloister on the second floor. These archetypes, with their strong geometry and dimensions, organize the house’s distribution.

The atrium, the highest space in the house, features four central pillars framing a virtual space for the living room.

The upper cloister shares similar characteristics but lacks the atrium’s centrality. It surrounds the courtyard, prioritizing light and ventilation, expanding circulation spaces, and serving as a collective extension of the rooms.

Casa 1736 reconnects with traditional Mediterranean models, such as Gothic courtyards, incorporating bioclimatic and well-being values. Designed to exalt natural light, air stratification, and gravity, it aims to recover relationships with the urban environment.