LR House by Iñigo Beguiristain, Jokin Lecumberri and Antonio Cidoncha. Photograph by Iñaki Bergera.
Project description by Iñigo Beguiristain, Jokin Lecumberri and Antonio Cidoncha
It starts from a single requirement, a house on one floor, on a small and substantially square plot, with one of its sides open to a narrow street. The environment, a low-density rural nucleus typical of La Ribera de Navarra, is characterized by the heterogeneity of its buildings, with the rootless aridity and washed-out tones of its facades as the only binder of urban discourse. In this context, the strategy is based on the denial of the area, with a subtly mute façade and the vindication of the new architecture to provide interest and environmental quality to an introverted house, which looks at itself.
Illuminated by the evocative image of the Roman Impluvium, the project is inevitably structured around a courtyard. A void that replicates and regulates the autonomous geometry of the original site and, as an urban die, seeks to energize and articulate the domestic space. A clear structure, suggested by Kahn, which establishes an obvious hierarchy for the different uses of the house. The service units are cornered in the four corners, freeing up the spaces that enjoy better lighting and ventilation for the noblest rooms of the program. The mobile walls of glass and wood animate the continuous succession of spaces, open and closed, covered or not, in which the limits are definitively diluted when the patio occasionally opens onto the street and introduces the people into the house.
This act of opening inspires the construction and materiality of the house. The brick that covers half of the Cintruénigo facades extends over the floor and walls, configuring a homogeneous basement with a clear stereotomic identity. Its condition as an exterior envelope abounds in the idea of spatial continuity and dissolution of limits, increasing the sensation of spaciousness of the interior spaces. The essential presence of wood occasionally interrupts the continuity of the factory to solve partitions, providing the necessary warmth to the home. In another order, a porticoed structure of reinforced concrete rests on the perimeter load-bearing walls, revealing its tectonic nature, and supports the roof. Understood in continuity with the patio façades, it assumes all the expressiveness that is denied to the main doorway. Thus, crowning the construction, a sheet of zinc rests naturally on the obliquities of the roof and effectively resolves the folds of its complex volumetry, evidencing a clear desire for dematerialization and decontextualization.
