Hasta La Ideas

Over the last few years Mies van der Rohe‘s Barcelona Pavilion has been loaded with junk, and had its pools filled with coffee and milk. Now photographer Jordi Bernadó has taken the doors out and mounted them onto the facade.

Spanish photographer Jordi Bernadó is the latest in a series of artists to be invited to make his mark on the iconic structure, which was first completed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1929, dismantled in 1930, then reconstructed in the 1980s.

Responding to Mies’ original desire for the pavilion to be photographed before its doors were installed, Bernadó’s temporary intervention, named Second Reconstruction, involved removing the two glazed entrances and positioning them in front of one of the building’s travertine walls.

In this way, Bernadó says he has “restored the image” of the building. “The pavilion once again becomes, temporarily, what Mies imagined,” said the photographer.

“The doors ask the question. The building without doors is the answer,” he added.

The Barcelona Pavilion was reconstructed in the 1980s, using only black and white photographs as reference. Since then a number of architects, designers and artists have been invited to create a site-specific installation inside.

Last year Spanish architect Andrés Jaque filled the structure with items found in the basement, while Japanese duo SANAA installed a spiral of acrylic screens in 2009 and in 2008 Chinese artist Ai Weiwei replaced the water of the pools with milk and coffee.

Here’s a description of this year’s project from Jordi Bernadó:

The Pavilion. Second Reconstruction. An artistic project by Jordi Bernadó

Mies referred to the Pavilion as a “pavilion of representation”. An ephemeral building whose maximum value was to represent an idea.

The aspect of the pavilion that has endured is therefore an evocation, not an object. A conceptual, not a material, act. A generator of thought, not a generator of physical space.

Consequently, what remains of the Pavilion is the idea and its images. And Mies ordered the Pavilion to be photographed without doors. In Mies’s thought and view, the Pavilion had no doors.

In fact, the Pavilion existed in all its plenitude only when the doors were removed. The moment of the gaze is the only real moment.

The photographer proposes, through a minimal gesture, to restore the image of the pavilion by removing the doors. The pavilion without doors at last. At its side, doors without a building. The pavilion reconstructed at last. And the doors out of their setting, by themselves generating the question posed by the intervention. The doors ask the question. The building without doors is the answer.

Photographing is not only fabrication of images (and therefore objectual). It is above all a gaze (and therefore intellectual). The photographer gazes. And gazes, presumably and ironically, as Mies did. And curiously enough, it is thanks only to the gaze that the pavilion once again becomes, temporarily, what Mies imagined. In this way, the time factor is transformed also into a fundamental aspect of the project.

Concept, immortality, time, estrangement. Ideas with which Mies worked and which constitute the essence of the Pavilion. And which the project reclaims also. As Ms Hock said, ‘gazing is inventing’.

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Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion appeared first on Dezeen.

En 2013, les architectes de l’agence espagnole H Arquitectes ont conçu cette maison familiale située à Sant Cugat del Vallès, à Barcelone. Le design travaille sur les matières en confrontant le béton, la brique rouge, le vieux bois avec une dominante de blanc minimaliste. Les photos sont signées Adrià Goula.

Gaps between the three brick boxes of this house near Barcelona by local firm H Arquitectes can be transformed from enclosed rooms into covered patios by folding back glass doors at both ends (+ slideshow).

Located in the town of Sant Cugat near Barcelona, the house was designed by H Arquitectes for a couple with a large art collection, who wanted plenty of wall space and a strong connection between indoors and outdoors.

“One of the main goals was to achieve a close and essential relationship between the house and the garden in such a way that they both became the extension of each other,” the architects explained.

Instead of inserting large windows into the facade to connect the house’s interior with the garden, the architects enclosed the main living room and entrance hallway with full-height wooden doors that can be folded to one side to open these spaces up to the garden.

The entrance hall is simply furnished with a bureau by the doorway and leads through to a long outdoor table, while sofas and armchairs in the other interstitial space create a comfortable living area which the architects said acts as “a green house during winter and a fresh porch in summer.”

Both of the gaps between the boxes act as routes from the front of the house to the back and feature polished concrete floors that extend into the garden on one side and a gravel pathway on the other.

Load-bearing brick walls give the exterior of the three volumes a uniform appearance. In the living room and hallway the red brick becomes the surface of the interior walls, while in the other rooms the masonry has been whitewashed.

Windows are carefully positioned to make the most of the garden views while maintaining privacy where required, and feature traditional external roller blinds to protect the interior from the sun.

The box at the eastern end of the site houses three children’s bedrooms on the first floor and a playroom on the ground floor.

The single storey central box contains a large kitchen, while the third box provides the parents with a bedroom on the ground floor and a studio space above.

Concrete slabs sheltering the spaces between the brick volumes are left with a raw finish, creating a textured ceiling that continues throughout the ground floor rooms.

Brick is also used to clad the edges of a small swimming pool in the western corner of the plot.

Photography is by Adrià Goula.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

House 1101

Not so many jobs begin like this one, with an owners’ list of wishes and hopes for their new home. A list much closer to the principles and values architects usually work with, often secretly, than the ordinary expectations of those couples facing this unknown challenge. Lists always full of good intentions but often incomplete. This was the start, loaded with responsibility, yet an excellent start.

The plot, located in a residential area of Sant Cugat, near Barcelona, had enough good attributes to become the project main line. One of the main goals was to achieve a close and essential relationship between the house and the garden in such a way that they both became the extension of each other. All that, without falling into the unavoidable, often out of proportion, and so recurrent large glazed panels: they wanted walls, and we also did. A house with walls in a garden for an art collectors couple.

For those reasons, from the right beginning, the proposal searches the balance between placing the maximum number of rooms on the ground floor yet keeping the garden free from masonry work volumes. This idea is developed through a volumetric composition shaped in three boxes spread throughout the garden, almost aligned and located in the plot northern side creating a wide outer zone facing south. The first box, to the east, houses the children’s area with three single bedrooms upstairs and a playroom on the ground floor. The second one, in the centre, accommodates the main room: the kitchen, a nearly 30 square metre and 4 metre high room dominated by a large fireplace. The third box, to the west, contains the parents’ zone, with the bedroom at the garden level and a high ceiling studio on the first floor.

The spaces created between the three boxes are covered sheltering two different environments, open to the garden in north-south direction and can be closed with big folding windows. These spaces offer a very different atmosphere, much more related to the garden area than to the house. The first of these interstitial ambiences, between the children’s area and the kitchen, serves as entrance hall. The second one, bigger, between the parents’ zone and the kitchen, is the living room but not a conventional one: a green house during winter and a fresh porch in summer.

The residence is all circled by the garden, the most part of it facing south. The corner (west), sharp-shaped, gathers the kitchen garden and a pond to bath in. In the north, the distance between the green fence and the house varies between 5 and 6 metres and increases up to 9 metres at the uncovered car parking place. This space is connected through a 3 metres wide path, parallel to the east fence, with the main southern garden. The interstitial spaces of the house (entrance hall and living room) become connecting porches between the front and back gardens.

About volumes, the house is composed of three brick masonry cubes of different heights set parallel to the back street. Although having several dimension windows that depend on their function, the cubes are predominantly massive. Besides, the interstitial areas between cubes, covered by a concrete slab and framed by folding wooden glass doors, are essentially ethereal. Actually, the space becomes an open porch when windows are folded back.

According to its materiality, the house is built on double face brick load-bearing walls, using red masonry for the outer face while white painted inside; wooden window and door frames with traditional outer roller blinds as sunscreen when required. The house is conditioned with a geothermal heat pump and an under floor heating system that slightly refreshes the house during summer, avoiding an air conditioned system to dehumidify.

Site: Sant Cugat del Vallès, Barcelona.
Architect: HARQUITECTES (David Lorente, Josep Ricart, Xavier Ros, Roger Tudó)
Collaborators: Blai Cabrero Bosch, architect (HARQUITECTES); Carla Piñol Moreno, quantity surveyor (HARQUITECTES); Iñaki González de Mendiguchia Garmendia, quantity surveyor; DSM arquitectes (structural engineer); Àbac enginyers (insallations); Eliseu Guillamón / Pere Cabassa (landscape)
Project year: 2011-2013
Constructed surface: 323m2

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that double as sheltered patios appeared first on Dezeen.

Spanish firm Nook Architects has renovated a Barcelona apartment by adding patterned floor tiles plus a combined step and window seat leading out onto the terrace (+ slideshow).

The Casa Sal apartment in the Poble Sec district of the city is only three metres wide and 19 metres long.

Nook Architects covered the kitchen, bathroom and study with patterned ceramics to divide up the space visually. They then used wooden flooring for a softer look and feel in the rest of the home.

The kitchen acts as the hub of the apartment by linking the living room and the bedroom areas. Nook said they placed extra emphasis on the kitchen.

“For our client, the most important part was the kitchen which had to be the heart of the home; functional, resistant, lively, and very much on the lead in regards to the rest of the room.”

The brightly tiled kitchen leads on to the living room and a slightly raised terrace. Before work started the terrace was in poor condition and could only be accessed through a narrow, opaque door.

To make it feel more connected to the rest of the home, Nook fitted a window seat that doubles as a step with storage space underneath. By using the same material for the top of the bench and floor of the terrace they managed to integrate the terrace with the rest of the apartment. The sliding window doors also allow far more natural light into the room.

Like the kitchen and living room, the client’s bedroom is separated from the study by using floor tiles. Again, Nook used the eye-catching tiles to divide up the relatively small space.

It is becoming increasingly popular to use encaustic floor tiles in Barcelona, with many architects uncovering original flooring from the 1960s. In this case, with no original tiles to unearth, Nook’s client chose the tiles herself – a floral theme for the study, a checkerboard tile for the bathroom and geometrical patterns for the kitchen.

Photography is by nieve.

Here’s a project description from Nook Architects:

CASA SAL, Apartment in Poble Sec, Barcelona

For nook there are two different types of projects from the client’s point of view: that of an owner who will live on the dwelling, and those focused for an unknown user (for example, a rental apartment). On commissions for the first example, we try get to know the client’s day to day customs and habits as thoroughly as possible- anything that could have an effect on their way of life. This was the case of CASA SAL, where the refurbishment of a dwelling was shaped around personality of its owner.

On the other hand, we had to face de difficulties of the original geometry, a very compartmentalised rectangle, only 3 metres wide, and 19 metres long. On one of its ends lay a terrace in very poor conditions, elevated in regards to the dwellings floor level, which could only be accessed through a narrow, opaque door.

These were the premises we worked around in order to solve the architectural problems of the property and the functional requirements of our client. From the start, it involved teamwork, between the architects and the client.

For the client, the most important part was the kitchen, which had to be the heart of the home; functional, resistant, lively, and very much on the lead in regards to the rest of the room. The kitchen therefore articulates the rest of the spaces: on one side there’s the living room with Access to the terrace, and on the other the most private areas, her bedroom and study, a bathroom and a guest room.

To counter the sensation of the narrow proportions of the dwelling, we treated the pavement with fringes of different types of very eye-catching finishes, placing more resistant materials in the kitchen, bathroom, and study, and combining them with Wood for a softer look and feel on the rest of the home. Our client participated by choosing the different tiles used: a hydraulic mosaic for the kitchen with geometrical shapes, a floral theme for the study, and a checker board for the bathroom.

For the terrace, we had a double objective: to solve the deficient connection between it and the living room and to transform into source of natural light, giving it a purpose all year long. This is why we decided to open a large hole on the facade and placed a seating bench that doubles as a stair and storage area with bookcases and drawers. The same pavement was used to finish the terrace on the outside, and the bench on the inside, making the terrace part of the living room itself.

We understood from the beginning that even though our intervention was over, the client’s intervention had only begun. She now has a starting point based on a very familiar architecture to her past, her tastes, and way of live, which will evolve naturally and alongside herself.

Architects: nook architects
Location: Barcelona, España
Year: 2013

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window seat to Barcelona apartment renovation appeared first on Dezeen.

Decorative tiles salvaged from different apartments are rearranged in stripes across the floor of this Barcelona residence by Spanish studio Bach Arquitectes (+ slideshow).

Architects Anna and Eugeni Bach were asked to renovate a pair of existing apartments on the upper two floors of a housing block in Barcelona’s Eixample district to create a two-storey home for a young family, which is named Urgell Apartment.

While the upper flat had been built in the 1960s, the one below it was considerably older and still contained some of the original encaustic floor tiles, which were made by pouring differently pigmented ceramics into a mould divided by walls before pressing the tiles to create a pattern that goes right through.

“In Barcelona it is quite typical to find these kind of tiles in old flats from the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth,” Eugeni Bach told Dezeen. “The problem was that there were not enough tiles for the whole flat because in some rooms they had been replaced for newer ones.”

Luckily, the architects managed to find more of the tiles when another flat in the block was being refurbished. “We asked them what they were doing with the old tiles and they wanted to get rid of them, so we took them to our site,” said Bach.

With seven different kinds of tiles, the architects created a variety of stripes across the entire lower floor, including a large living and dining room, a children’s bedroom and a small bathroom.

A new pine staircase ascends to a master bedroom, bathroom and study on the level above.

This staircase is contained with a boxy structure that encompasses kitchen units and storage closets on the lower level, as well as laundry facilities and a desk on the upper floor.

“The second most important material in the flat is the pine wood for the cupboards, the stairs and the flooring on the upper level,” added Bach. 

Two voids are punched through the stairwell to improve views between floors. The first is a window that looks through to the kitchen, while the second provides a view onto the stairs from the study.

A decked terrace runs along the side of the upper floor and features a folding metal staircase that leads up to a larger terrace on the top of the roof.

It’s become quite fashionable to retain or reuse this type of traditional floor tile in Barcelona – see our slideshow of similar projects here.

Here’s some extra information from Bach Arquitectes:

Apartment Refurbishment in Urgell, Barcelona

The top two floors of a block in Barcelona’s Eixample should be reformed into a single apartment that could take advantage of the existing terraces.

The lower floor consisted of an apartment of about 65 m2, heading the street and getting some light to the kitchen and bathroom via an inner patio. The upper apartment, of about 40 m2, had been built later, probably during the 60s. It consisted of a simple volume built on the terrace, separated from the street and from one of the neighbouring buildings, leaving an L-shaped narrow open space.

The organisation of the apartment orbits around the staircase. This element becomes something more than just a communication device between the two floors by absorbing the kitchen and a storage space on the lower level, and the study and laundry space on the top floor. The staircase is as well the space for visual relationship between the two floors, via an inner window and a big opening on the upper studio which allows to get visual contact from the upper floor until the kitchen downstairs. This easy visual contact helps you understand the flat as a whole, and not just as the superposition of two different floors.

Given the surface of each floor, we understood that we had to organise the lower one as the main floor, which accommodates the entry, living room, dining room, kitchen, a room for children and a bathroom; while the upper floor is a more intimate place for the parents, with their bedroom, bathroom and a study room.

On the outer spaces, a folding ladder allows the lower terrace to gain room, leaving the top terrace as a space for occasional events. A shade on the top terrace offers shadow to all these spaces and, most important, closes the space giving a feeling of being somewhere between inside and outside.

The existing hydraulic floor tiles had been removed in earlier refurbishments and there were only enough pieces for half of the lower floor surface, but we were lucky enough, and we looked for such luck, that at the same time that we started the works, there was an other refurbishment in the same block where they were going to throw all their floor tiles away.

We picked those tiles and together with the existing ones in our apartment we checked the possibilities for different patterns on the lower floor. The final solution was to place the different tiles in stripes, despite the walls and partitions, so that we gained a feeling of continuity that helps you understand the floor plan as a continuous space.

On the lower floor, all the woodwork, both doors and windows, were preserved, maintaining the “spirit” of the Barcelona Eixample that this flat once had. Upstairs, where there were no elements worth preserving, both floor and windows were replaced by new items.

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Barcelona apartment by Bach Arquitectes appeared first on Dezeen.