The house, cut into a steep - 42 degrees - cliffside in the vicinity of Granada, near the Alhambra, was designed and built by architects Pablo Gil and Jaime Bartolomé from the Madrid office GilBartolomé, for a young couple with a modest budget (however, the amount of costs is not announced). Having been made public, the project caused a flurry of both delight and rejection, primarily because of the imitation of Antonio Gaudi - which the authors, however, do not deny, calling their project, no less, "a modern Gaudian cave." From above it looks like waves of the sea, and from below it looks like the skin of a dragon that has grown into the earth, the architects say, thus practically exhausting the possibilities of metaphors and epithets to describe their project.
A two-story house with a spacious living room and bedrooms on the second floor is cut rather deeply into the ground, and a double cover with an air pocket 40 cm wide around the entire perimeter is arranged around the living space box; the air in it assimilates its temperature directly from the ground - which is 19.5 Celsius here year-round - and is then used for heating, cooling and ventilation. Its flow is electronically regulated (including humidity control), but it is possible to manually increase its flow. In addition, the roof-facade consists of two concrete shells 7 cm thick each with a 40-cm layer of insulation between them - it served as a formwork for the upper concrete shell, which also made construction cheaper by creating a good heat-insulating shell. The two described techniques have led to the fact that the house does not require forced heating and ventilation throughout the year.
The space of the bunk living room is unsupported with a span of 14.5 meters, covered with a wavy ceiling, which echoes the shape of the concrete shell of the roof: the bends of the ceiling direct the streams of the sea breeze entering through a large window with a sliding stained glass window, which opens views of the Mediterranean Sea and access to two cantilevers terraces, where the lower terrace is a pool. Inside the living room there is a semblance of an amphitheater that can accommodate up to 70 guests. The three bedrooms on the top floor have three separate windows under a wavy roof (as if the "dragon" had one mouth from a tragic mask, and three eyes). Each bedroom window has a small balcony with crystal clear glass railing.
The shape of the ceiling supports the theme of the cave, and the fiberglass and polyester resin furniture designed specifically for the home on the computer spouts outwardly in places, clearly reminiscent of stalagmites. However, all this wild and somewhat even kitsch imagery - from Gaudí to the cave - is not the main thing in the project.
The authors go further and see a social message in their work. The house was under construction in 2015 during the financial crisis, when the unemployment rate was 26% on average in Spain, and even higher in Granada, up to 36%. Therefore, the authors designed the house in such a way as to attract maximum manual labor of local residents and, as far as possible, to abandon the elements produced in the factory. The roof formwork is made according to the patented method of the local engineer Manuel Rojas, using a very efficient metal grating according to the architects. Zinc roof flakes are also fabricated on site from sheet metal and hand-secured. The bends of the ceiling are manually covered with gypsum-based plaster from the inside; the furniture was made by the craftsmen on the spot according to the computer model, and they even made some improvements of their own. All these technologies - architects call them jumping between manual production and computer technology - have made it possible to achieve a sufficiently high quality of construction, and at a lower cost compared to industrial production. Moreover, the authors are confident that they were able to demonstrate the efficiency, convenience and low cost of their model of work to many construction workers, and now the new approach has every chance of spreading in Granada, competing with industrial housing construction.
“The construction industry of major developers over the past twenty years has taught Spaniards not to demand quality from residential buildings, accepting the bad architecture around us as the inevitability of the era,” the architects say. "Our house demonstrates that a different approach to construction is possible, that the developer and the consumer can achieve better quality at an affordable price." Directly some Luddites. Their mouths … But it turned out.
