Project: Piera House
Architecture: Fran Silvestre Arquitectos
Project Team: Fran Silvestre, Carlos Lucas, Estefanía Soriano,María Masià
Location: Burriana, Castellón, Spain
Area: 285 m2
Year: 2022
Photo Credits: Fernando Guerra
Text by Fran Silvestre Arquitectos
The Piera House project talks about setting limits and their permeability.
The first border is established between the street and the free space of the house, in Burriana, as in many municipalities the regulations establish a maximum dimension for the opaque fence and the rest of the height with a permeable materiality. We decided, perhaps influenced by the gate that Andreu Alfaro together with Emilio Giménez designed both in the house and in the sculptor’s studio, to make this border as an opaque filter for the views and penetrable for light and air, with a constant materiality in full height.
This fine line built with aluminum profiles, which are arranged at an angle that prevents the view from the outside, draws a patio with almost the entire available surface. The heated area is limited by large-format glass carpentry, creating the feeling that the entire plot is the main space of the house. The dimension of the water pond seeks to broaden the perception of spaciousness of this space.
On the upper floor are the private rooms of the house, a volume that aims to levitate is drawn with the same materiality that gives the interior a kind of veil from which to look without being seen. The dimension of this second floor exceeds the closed space of the ground floor, generating terraces and throwing another border, in this case immaterial, the shadow.
The accent is placed on a constructive element, the gate, understood as a lattice built with industrial elements that on this occasion defines the architecture, confers privacy and dynamically characterizes all the materials as they are pierced by the intense light. An effect that has always captivated us, it is no coincidence that the Muslim architecture in which this element was used called it that way, masrabiya (“maravilla” in spanish, wonder).
