Bitxo House stands on the gentle hills of the Pre-Pyrenean landscape of Graugés, in the Berguedá region, 100 kilometres north of Barcelona, with the Queralt mountain variety at the background and positioned among mountain style homes.The owners, Xavier and Queralt, each of them musicians, obtain, about 20 years ago, a plot to raise the stave, where to the score of their lives. More than time, without having rush. The design and style and construction of housing extends for more than 10 years, until nowadays.
In speak to with the ground, the lines of the stave get broken, absorb the trace of an old path and set a diagonal on the web site which then serves to structure a hierarchic procedure, adding components and processes, which are utilised to think the residence, and build it with a dramatic concrete structure loading a ceramic lattice. The spaces are defined by totally free-standing bodies lined with colourful glazed ceramic, below the concrete slab covered in Arabic tiles coated in conventional colour, as the regional rules mandate.
Beginning at the entrance, below the lattice, the spaces and rooms are arranged, structured along the trace, in a spiral movement that initially follows the all-natural slope with a ramp major to the kitchen, and a double-height dining and living rooms. The ascent continues, with half height levels to tight the spaces against the concrete slab of the roof in correspondence to the privacy of the primary and secondary bedrooms and service rooms. The end of the stroll, completed only in the project with a fireman’s pole, leads to the playing space for kids, redundant element for the whole house is, in reality, their playground.
The Bitxo Residence is the unpredictable outcome of a predictable and restrictive legislation, which regulates the creation of any new architecture to be presumably erected in a respectful manner towards the site and the traditional buildings.
Even so, a stone or ceramic façade, a conventional tile roofing or the nearby pastel colour chart, as set in the nearby regulations, are not enough to mimic the environment, nor to develop an architecture to be an “expression of its time” as pursued by modern day culture because the early twentieth century.
Bitxo House is a analysis on these circumstances of start: if the components are set by the regulations, the geometry expresses itself as a effective tool to turn round. The home is positioned perpendicular to the street, with a single slope roof that reduces the front façade to a big window. The house bows to the street opposing to the acts of assertiveness of the proud neighbouring facades. Rather, the primary volume is concentrated towards the garden, exactly where it achieves more privacy, away from street, zealously hiding the outside life of its inhabitants.
In contrast, its primary facade is perceived only tangentially, and extends all through the web site structuring the primary physique and the pool and garden shed volumes. The roof, with the slope and coating material set by regulations, becomes a unifying element of the spaces beneath, even though shaping them, as it gets closer or greater to the ground, characterizing the a lot more public or private rooms beneath.
It is tough to assess progress of information in a discipline such as architecture. We only have the intuition of getting prevented a setback in the on-going building of the planet in that single point. More data on Lagula Arquitectes web site.
