The house with nine frames, designed by architects María González García and Juanjo López de la Cruz of the Sol89 studio, is located in the village of Castilleja de la Cuesta, near Seville in southern Spain.

The architects had to adapt to the long, narrow plot of land as it is an agricultural plot with only one north-facing façade on the village's main street. The house has been prepared for the desired living space for the tenants and possible guest visits, such as a sauna and a small outdoor kitchen.
The Sol89 studio has chosen to generate the space through the repetition of equidistant frames. These frames define the corridors that are built on one or two floors and provide courtyards, all these elements shaping the morphology of the house. A first courtyard is created as a reception area that defines the relationship between the house and the exterior, from which three corridors emerge to form the living space, another corridor that forms the shaded porch, two that generate the south courtyard, and a final volume where one can paint or cook.

The white color of the house designed by Sol89, which distinguishes it from the surrounding houses, recalls the old houses of Castilleja de la Cuesta, which have been lost in favor of others with the colors and materials of more commercial constructions. Other traditional elements of the village houses included in this one are a cornice-visor, a frieze, a balcony overlooking the street, the openwork wall, and the shutter on the door from which the courtyard-entrance hall can be glimpsed.



House of the nine frames by Sol89. Photograph by Fernando Alda.

Description of project by Sol89

Gemma and Álvaro decide to make their first home after decades of living in Belgium with the memory of their life in Catalonia and Asturias always present. They return to Andalusia, where he studied, looking for the life of a southern village, bright, peaceful, close to Seville, where they can meet up with a mutual friend.

They bought a plot of land measuring 5x30 meters with a single façade facing almost north on the main street. The plot is narrow and long, the result of the agricultural plots that allowed the coexistence of the house with some buildings for the storage of farm implements or corrals. The program to be developed is modest, with just a couple of bedrooms and a few special features, such as a room where they can both enjoy a sauna, a place where Gemma can make engravings, and where they can have a small outdoor kitchen. They expect visits from friends and family from time to time whom they would like to welcome. They carry objects, books, and paintings, traces of a lifetime, they also carry with them memories of having lived in intense places whose experience they would like to recover: a well and a tree, a courtyard, the southern light.

The proportions of the site and the agricultural memory of these plots suggest generating space by repeating equidistant frames, which define bays that are built on one or two floors or are hollowed out to generate courtyards, providing a continuous space that gradually shades its environmental and functional characteristics. In this way a sequence is created, with a first reception courtyard that qualifies the relations with the street, then three centrelines that house the dwelling, one more centrelines of which only the structure remains to formalize a shaded porch in the manner of a canopy, two bays that constitute the courtyard to the south (more like a "hortus conclusus") and the last volume that finishes off the site as a pavilion where to paint and cook with friends, whose roof, lower than the rest of the house, is planted with shrubs, a continuation of the garden where the well and the tree that lived in Gemma's memory take shape as a persimmon tree and a small pool whose emptying provides the water for irrigation.

The metallic construction of this structure and the almagra color, typical of the first paints that once protected the steel, rhythms the space and form a continuous reference. The standard portico recesses the supports concerning the party walls to avoid conflicts with the neighboring houses with load-bearing walls, and the resulting space between this structural line and the longitudinal boundaries is occupied with the equipment, technical spaces, and storage of the home, creating two unequal lateral bands that redefine the limits of the dwelling. By opening up the house at the ends to two courtyards to the north and south, a series of ventilators installed in each bay, and a natural ventilation chimney situated on the side of the middle bay, a cross breeze is provided in all the rooms which, together with the protection of the south elevation with the canopy that will soon be covered with bignonias, alleviates the southern heat.    

The house appears on the street as a massive, white construction, an imitation of the first constructions of Castilleja that have been gradually lost, replaced by colors and materials typical of the more commercial and immediate construction industry. A cornice-visible window, a frieze, a balcony overlooking the street, the openwork wall, and the shutter of the door from which to glimpse the courtyard-entranceway establish a syntax that refers to elements of popular architecture that facilitate the encounter between the private and the public and help to build the street.

More information

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Architects
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Sol89. Architects.- María González García, Juanjo López de la Cruz.

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Proyect team
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Technical architect.- Cristóbal Galocha.
Architecture students.- Javier Valenzuela, Miriam Domínguez.

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Collaborators
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Structure.- Duarte y Asociados.
Installations.- Miguel Sibón.

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Client
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Private.

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Builder
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Meta 360.

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Area
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167 sqm.

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Dates
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13 September 2022.

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Location
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Castilleja de la Cuesta, Seville, Spain.

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Photography
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Fernando Alda, Álvaro Marín.

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Sol89. María González - Juanjo López de la Cruz. María (Huelva, 1975) and Juanjo (Sevilla, 1974) graduated from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Sevilla in 2000,  tenth and third in their class of a total of 348 and awarded the highest grade in their Final Degree Projects, receiving both prizes in the 13th edition of the Dragados Final Project awards. After a one-year scholarship at L´École d´Architecture de Paris-la Seine in France, they worked for the Spanish architects Javier Terrados and Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra.

Following this experience they established their own office Sol89 in 2001, a practice in which they strive to accommodate research, teaching, and professional practice. Over the years, SOL89 has had the chance to carry out and build projects throughout intermediate spaces of the city as well as reuse obsolete structures. This work has been widely published in national and international magazines and journals and has received several awards, most recently: First prizes in the Architecture Awards of the Architectural Institute of Seville and Huelva (2006, 2015, and 2016), Silver Medal of the Fassa Bortolo Prize (Italy, 2013), the Wienerberger 1st Prize (Austria, 2014), Silver Medal of the Fritz-Höger Preis (Germany, 2014), the Grand Prix Philippe Rotthier of European Architecture (Belgium, 2014), 1st prize in the X Enor Young Architecture Award (Spain, 2014) and the 40under40 prize 2014 of the Chicago Athenaeum for Young European architects (USA, 2014). They are finalists of the Spanish Biennale of Architecture 2014,  they have been nominated for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture-Mies van der Rohe Award 2015 and chosen to represent Spain in the XV Biennale di Venezia 2016, winner of the Golden Lion.

They are Associate Professors at the Department of Design of the Architecture School in Seville since 2005 and Master's degrees in Architecture and Sustainable Cities, University of Seville 2008. Their professional and academic career also spans the field of architectural thought; They have published articles and spoken at conferences, as well as directed seminars and meetings, such as the International Congress dedicated to the work of Jørn Utzon for the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía (2009) and the annual seminars Acciones Comunes (2013, 2016 and 2017) for the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo about artistic and architectural strategies. They are the coauthors of the books Cuaderno Rojo (University of Seville, 2010) and Acciones Comunes (Universidad Menéndez Pelayo, 2014), and authors of Proyectos Encontrados (Recolectores Urbanos, 2012) as well as El dibujo del mundo (Lampreave, 2014). In this order, these books are reflections on research in architectural design, the debris of contemporary architectural culture, and the idea of journey and drawing in the work of the Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn.

They have been curators of the XVI Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, held in Seville in 2023.
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