Girona, Spain, Basic House

design by Anna & Eugeni Bach
arquitectes photos by Jordi Bernadó, Nuria Fuentes
text by Matteo Vercelloni

In the village of Gaüses, near Girona, Spain, a small home-atelier designed by two young architects as a painting studio and weekend refuge. A project built with a very small budget, winner of the FAD 2008 opinion award in the Architecture category.

How to build a house today with just 70,000 euros? An amount that would usually just be enough to renovate a medium-sized flat? The budget was the starting point in this project by Anna and Eugeni Bach, architects just over thirty. Materials, techniques and human resources had to be local, to optimize every construction process, reducing distances and waste. So the whole project had to be ‘eco-compatible’, by necessity, combining compositional invention with the use of local energies and products. A rectangular block became the space for working, extending the domestic interiors toward the surrounding greenery by means of a large porticoed border on two sides, and an essential pergola structure composed of aluminium section that supports a roof of reeds, a common feature in the Mediterranean. The second ‘skin’ of the house (which can be replaced, due to normal wear, every two years, for a total cost of 120 euros) does not only organize the roof in three sections – built with sloped pitches to conform to local standards – but also descends vertically to form perimeter screens that underline the character of open-air rooms and routes, including the large pergola. The smooth cement floors join inside and outside, together with the large sliding corner window that ‘cuts’ the walls, projecting the large living area toward the portico and garden. The external walls, painted with green and white vertical stripes, partially erase the elementary form of the rectangle, creating an irregular rhythm that is enhanced by the shadows of the canework. The striped motif marks the two sides toward the portico, while the remaining sides are painted green, functioning as unified screens to welcome the projection of the shadows of trees, utilized as ‘natural decoration’. The roof, beyond the first pitch of the portico, has been subdivided into two pitches sloping inward, corresponding to zones in the house: the first, covering almost 2/3 of the surface, is for the living areas (kitchen, dining, living or atelier). An accessorized spine behind the kitchen – made of wood panels reassembled from packing crates – contains the accessway and the bathroom, separated from the two bedrooms. Rain water is collected in a well for watering the garden, while a ventilated interspace of 30 cm extending across the whole roof, with ‘uralite’ panels, visible from inside, produces good insulation, drawing the warm air toward the upper part of the house and keeping the bedrooms cool with a natural method of climate control.