Project: Traditional Style House La Diana
Architects: CRÜ Studio
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Project Year 2017
Photography: Adrià Goula Photo
Text by RÄS Studio
La Diana is the exercise of linking visually, volumetrically and functionally two independent and different entities: a commercial space on the ground floor and an apartment on the first floor. The architectural strategy was based on drilling the existing slab creating a large enough vacuum to activate this relationship in section and where the vertical communication is deployed through a light stairway tangent to the existing wall.
This stairway fragments into two bodies to offer a more human staircase on the ground floor through a 2,20 m metal and porous platform that acts as an intermediate landing and, at the same time, segments the living room, the dinning room and the kitchen. It is because it was a ground floor that the problem of privacy had to be resolved by recreating the access façade generating a semi-exterior patio as a filter between the street and the living place.
On the first floor, the night program is organized around the double space. The perimetral enclosures are solved with packages that include cabinets, access room doors and glass top cards that allow bringing natural light from the façades to the vacuum of the stairs.
The materialization is answering the desire to recover and/or emphasize the original condition of the traditional style house. A piece of natural terracotta is placed on a running board as the pavement and the walls are stripped to expose the original factory work with all its defects and textures. On the first floor, a perimeter tape of plaster mortar finishes the contact with the joists causing a sense of controlled domesticity of how architecture is seeking to react on a human level.
