Studio Banana TV interviews Morales-De Giles, authors of the labyrinthian social housing renovation in the historical centre of Cádiz, Spain.
This is an operation on an old palatial house inhabited by eleven families who have sought a living space for themselves amongst the old walls of the street grid in the modest Pópulo district of Cadiz.
The aim of this project is to rehouse the tenants on the same property in a respectful manner, dignifying their lives without erasing their memories, injecting the technical progress of modernity, providing the necessary ventilation and lighting required to create inhabitable spaces that previously did not exist, making concessions to current times without falling into the trap of spatial standardisation and rationalisation, and instead, learning from casual, arbitrary occurrences in order to enrich the particular circumstances of each one.
The initial conditions and the formal complexity of this project, in which there was a manifest interest in preserving the historic values of this home, led us to a solution in which four types of operation are intertwined: the renovation and consolidation of the 18th century walls, in addition to the ones that are even older (ground and first floor); the unaltered restructuring of the courtyards required by the local regulations; the replacement of the building (second-floor); and an upper-level extension (setback attic). All of this involves consolidation work on the ground and first floors, above which the new architecture emerges to complete the brief and consolidate their morphology of the house.
The need to maintain exactly the same building area and not change the current frontage height led us to design a project which would have 5 decent dwellings and a ground floor shop space for the local neighbourhood association.
One of the main goals is to recover the former street character of the branch of this allotment that is connected to the little square beside the new cathedral. This will be a private lane, two storeys high and partially roofed, with ventilation and light entering through two courtyards and a gap in the facade. It will also enable windows to be opened up onto the street and a truly urban interior landscape to be created. This operation recovers the rectangular plan of the house at the peak of its splendour in the 18th century, while leaving intact the facade wall from the old period, situated alongside this little square.
Ultimately, the project takes us on a tangential tour to discover what the property was like at the time of its peak splendour. To do so, it digs out what was once a street, an operation that opens up a series of apertures to the sky and the city space that endow it with spatial and architectural quality. This sculpting operation links up with the vertical space of the main courtyard, emerging among the roof alongside the newly built attics. Three personalities overlook the cathedral and the Mediterranean scene.
In Pópulo house, the void is twisted and solidified thanks to the mould space that shapes the new interior lane of these jigsaw homes.
