It is a building with a philosophy of 3 in 1. Formed by 3 floors and 1 attic, it is a house that can function individually by floors, or can be used as a whole.
The structure is made up of wooden beams with ceramic interlacing. The walls are left uncovered, leaving their original brick framework. The colour blue is the predominant colour for its ancient protective symbolism.
Emphasis is also placed on improving the conditions of habitability. Care was taken to ensure natural light and adequate ventilation.
Gif of Mediona 13 by NUA Arquitectures.
Description of project by NUA Arquitectures
Mediona 13 proposes to re-inhabit the old quarter of Tarragona, re-inhabiting the pre-existences and adding a new temporal stratum to its memory. A new life on 2,000 years of history.
The capacity of historic cities to evolve and transform themselves gives rise to rich and complex urban settings. In these multi-temporal environments, memory is responsible for bringing together the different historical strata that coexist in the same space, formed from dialogue through time. The result of all these accumulated processes and gestated through spontaneous actions is a heterogeneous city generated through the interaction of various objects and fabrics from different times and cultures that form a compact and coherent physical and symbolic unit.
The urban form of the old quarter of Tarragona is based on the layout of the Roman city acropolis, located on the top of a small promontory facing the sea. This small walled citadel was organised around three stepped platforms: the temple of Augustus at the highest point, where the Cathedral stands today, the Forum Square, from where the Province was administered, and the Circus, on the lower terrace. From the structure of the Roman city and through successive transformations throughout history, a complex and diverse fragment of the city flourished in which the built-up mass, the current public space, and the day-to-day life of the citizens coexist with the remains of the Roman city and the successive subsequent medieval, Renaissance and modern transformations.
Today, however, the old quarter of Tarragona, as in many other cities, finds itself in a complicated situation between nostalgia and abandonment. The regeneration of the historic city and, above all, of its main substance, housing, is an obligation and a necessity, on the one hand, because it is the part of the city that keeps its memory and contains the most interesting fabrics, and, on the other, because it offers a compact, dense, hybrid, human and pleasant city model that offers everything that an efficient and sustainable city proposal would wish for.
Mediona 13 is the rehabilitation of one of the numerous uninhabited houses in the historic centre of Tarragona, and the intervention consists of reactivating the dwelling to allow its use to be flexible, improving its habitability conditions by bringing natural light and ventilation into all its spaces, and attempting to preserve to the maximum the essence, the memory and the spirit of the existing construction by reproducing the very codes of formation of the historic city, that is to say, using the superposition and accumulation of the different layers of time as a project tool.
3 in 1. The dwelling is made up of a ground floor, three floors and a mezzanine. Each floor corresponds to an intimate unit containing spaces for cooking and eating, cleaning and resting. At the same time, a wide variety of interior openings allow permeability between the intimate space and the common space, made up of entrances and collective rooms. In this way, the units can function both independently and in relation to each other. The dwelling can therefore be understood as 3 houses in 1: a house between party walls that can accommodate from 3 small cohabitation units to a large family.
The house is situated between three party walls and a façade on Carrer Mediona, a narrow street situated on what was once the old Roman square of the Provincial Forum. The intervention on the house is articulated through two fundamental strategies: getting natural light and air into every corner of the house, and rehabilitating and re-adapting the structure of the house to the needs of contemporary housing.
On the one hand, the improvement in lighting is achieved through a new transparent access door in the street that allows light to travel through the heart of the house, the interior square that welcomes its inhabitants and to flow through the staircase to the dwellings through a succession of new interior windows that, at the same time, provide new visual relations between the communal spaces and the dwellings. At the rear of the house, an existing courtyard is widened and new windows and balcony doors open onto it, bringing light into the rear spaces and allowing cross ventilation of all the dwellings. The various interior windows allow light to flow through the facades of this collective atrium and reach all the spaces.
On the other hand, the structure of wooden beams and ceramic beams supported by the party walls is reinforced with mullions, replacing the beams that could not be preserved due to the termites. The staircase is reinforced with platens and rounds, which are also its handrail. The party walls are treated and, where necessary, stripped to be stitched and consolidated. Colours are discovered on these walls that correspond to the different lives the house has had and which are used in the new structural elements. Tile is the colour chosen for the common space on the ground floor and the staircase, a colour that already existed in this area of the house and which was traditionally used for hygienic reasons on façades and openings as a measure of protection against pests and evil spirits.
