Studio Banana TV interviews Magüi Gonzalez, author of the sea-side Ruiz House in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
The house is situated in a fishermen’s neighborhood on the island of Gran Canaria in a landscape dominated by self-built houses and shanty dwellings, and sits apparently unfinished in this place on the city outskirts.
Intended for an artist, it consists of a single interconnected space on two floors and a habitable basement, of great height and as unobstructed as possible. Three equivalent spaces: the basement for video projections, the beach level for social life, and the upper level for sleeping.
The different living areas of the house are formed by small level changes, which in turn serve as seats, as the dining room area, set lower, or the kitchen, and which also create openings that allow the passage of light and ventilation to the basement. The roof is used as a place for outdoor living. It has a garden of indigenous plants and is covered with smooth round stones from the beach, while a small water tank refreshes the atmosphere.
The supporting structure is steel and floors are made of prefab concrete hollow core slabs with a trowelled polished concrete finish.
In the interior the original walls were preserved. Built of beach stones of different sizes and from different periods, they are the only remnant kept from an earlier house.
The house shows its face to the sea on a base of stones and concrete, on whose surface a copper-treated pinewood frame with large frosted or clear glass windows has been mounted, in one of which there is a cut-out by the artist Kirsten Mösel.
The façade facing the highway is completely the opposite from the previous one: it is blind, the texture is concrete, with grooves or stria through which rust from the Corten steel drip edges will flow, thus being incorporated over time as a project material.
Interview by Studio Banana TV. Translation by Harold Ortiz.
