Rehabilitation of 5 Homes in the Barrio del Pópulo. Cádiz, Spain

This project is about the “natural history” of cities. An old mansion whose dwellings have subdivided the interior space. These partitions have been adjusting the people to their spaces. Rooms that fit and are achieved by drilling a wall. Windows that proportion the interior space of makeshift rooms. Views towards the exterior that truly prioritize and structure the floors of the various homes that are engulfed by the primitive house.

Streets that over time have ended up being situated inside a constructed magma that has stolen them from the city, but that has also multiplied the special sensations of the inner world of the ancient house. A crowded-house. The problem from the point of view of the design is obvious: is it possible to formulate “a design” on this archeology of living? Our choice has been to increase the phenomena that the “crowded-house” had. In this way all our work has consisted in showing the meeting place between the space and the daily life. This design could not, according to our idea, be planned simply as a matter of adjusting surfaces, i.e. solving each dwelling merely as square meters housed in a big primitive house. On the contrary, it was necessary to increase the number of stories and phenomena that fit into one cubic metre.

Commissioned by the Office of Rehabilitation of the historic town of Cadiz, the project is carried out in an old mansion clogged with 11 families who seek their space between the old walls of the popular neighbourhood of Pópulo in Cadiz. In addition to concerns about the relocation of the maximum number of tenants, the reuse of historic structures allows us to propose a drastic change in the housing programs, changing the concept of m2 to that of m3. Instead of working with surfaces, we will work with volumes.

They are two very different architectural concepts: surface or volume. The first one heaps the population into some standards linked to the concept of minimum housing, social or protected–according to the parameters used–and the second is connected with the concept of space. The first is linked to the “planning”, then to the typology and always to rationality and the monetary profitability of the operation. The second extends from the life of the residents, from their own bodies, with a radically different economic concept.

In this way, the objective is to relocate the existing tenants in the same building and dignify their living conditions, without losing their memory.

Another added responsibility for the project was to return to the families their same way of understanding the habitat, i.e. the same intense relationship between private and collective spaces that so characterized the previous state of the building.

The idea is to equip the dwellings with the technical advances of contemporary life and provide the necessary ventilation and lighting to the living spaces, with a nod to our epoch, without falling into the trap of standardizing the spaces. Learning from the casual and arbitrary in order to enrich the particularities of each one. The need to maintain the same fl oor area and not change the height of the current facade of the building leads us to the development of a design that accommodates five dwellings as well as a premises for the neighborhood association on the ground floor. Another major objective is to restore the character of the street that once held the arm of the plot that is connected to the small square next to the New Cathedral. It will be a private street, two stories high, partially covered, a ventilated and lighted street passing through two courtyards and a hole in the facade. This will permit the opening of windows onto the new street and actually create an interior urban landscape.

This operation reclaims the rectangular floor that the house enjoyed in its period of maximum splendor in the XVIII century and maintains the pristine facade wall of the old epoch which is situated next to a small square, while the remains from the XVII century and the most ancient walls are consolidated and rehabilitated. The result is the intense relationship between the private spaces and the new collective space that blends with the urban space. This can be discovered on the edges of the recess that is initiated with the recuperation of the old street and ends up connecting with the very emptiness of the vertical space in the main courtyard, which emerges onto the roof along with the newly constructed attic apartments. Three characters that look out towards the

Cathedral and the Mediterranean.