AAG HOUSE, SPAIN - architeria.eu

AAG HOUSE – READY MADE HOUSE

Albuixech is a small agrarian town near Valencia, about 15 km long. A young couple bought a derelict building.
They saw other projects of our office and were interested in our way of work.

Functional needs were usual: A living-room, dinner space with kitchen and a little bath in the floor plan.
Maybe one court. And in the upper floor they needed a main room and two little ones, with only one bathroom
for all. Maybe a terrace in the roof.

Then, the idea was to put the main body of the building in the centre of the plot. Always protected from
the exterior, noise and people of the street. It´s a very common solution in our Mediterranean culture.
A cold court to the east and sea winds in the entrance to the plot, and a hot one, to the south, in the inner
part of it. It provides a good crossing ventilation and a perfect climatic control. Even, a privacy and intimate
place of living.

But...? How to make a façade thought like a limit, but it’s not the real façade of the house? The idea of the
metallic façade was to make, with a ready-made ( like Marcel Duchamp ) material ( this grid or tissue of metal )
usually used for parking doors in Valencia, a very strange and new utilisation of it, changing its scale and
giving a new image to a common and " dirty " material. To re-think the possibilities of re-cycling elements.
Re-discovering materials.

It was an exciting work. Without problems with planning permission, it was a beautiful surprise for the client,
seeing it growing. The constructor made an incredible good work. And we were amazed of the low cost for
the simply and radical decision of make it with a forgotten material. Some words on it, in our mother dialect,
remember us the significant and textual character of architecture: Light, Water, Sky, Jesus and Thirteen.

Inner floor plan space is defined with some free functional boxes left over the space. They define a liquid
open space flowing around them, from one court to the other. A simply scheme of corridor and pieces
solves the upper level, extending the space with a balcony to the street. Two repeated but different stairs
links the three levels. White, grey and black as basic colours. Metal and wood as textures. Glass used to
repeat , mix and des-materialize the inner images. A protect of ready-made things . Rediscovered and always
different. As architecture. As life.