In the historic center of Toledo, the building coexists with traditional architecture, taking advantage of the unevenness of the access street, the building adapts to the neighboring buildings and looks into the most distinctive of the city where the building achieves a presence in the same.
Description of project by Romero Vallejo
Bathed by the River Tagus, the city of Toledo, a World Heritage Site since 1986, houses Mudejar jewels, Islamic art, Romanesque remains, and Renaissance and Baroque examples, which reflect the passage of different cultures in the city's architectural heritage.
Casa Mirador del Valle is located on the southern slope of the historic center of Toledo, in one of the enclaves that constitute one of the most emblematic images of the city, collected in infinite artistic and photographic documents throughout history, from El Greco to Andy Warhol, passing through countless artists, as well as the "global tourist universe".
One of the main challenges presented by this project consisted of how to integrate contemporary architecture in this environment of great historical tradition, where the final building would also have a great presence in the city.
"... it was about finding a balance where to value the context but, at the same time, not lose the identity of a contemporary intervention".
Romero Vallejo.
The project sits on a narrow plot of 8m frontage and 13m deep, with access from a steep twisty street from where the main volume of the proposal rises, which adapts its urban alignment to neighboring architectures.
The building is closed to the street, presenting a single opening as a work lattice. Inside the site, the creation of a "street-patio" in the longitudinal direction of the plot allows us to give the building the façade that it does not have and thus provide the building with impressive views of the surroundings, as well as the lighting conditions and optimal ventilation.
Taking advantage of the steep unevenness of the access road ¨Cuesta del Can ", there are two entrances to the house.
In the first of them, located on the ground floor of the building, with direct access to the "street-patio", there is a porch, as a prelude to the house. On this floor, there is also a small guest apartment. The second entrance takes place on the first floor of the building, where there is natural access when arriving from the city center. This level houses the bedrooms and a small study. From there you can access the upper floor, where the living-dining room is located along its entire length by a large terrace, like a loggia, which frames the landscape and protects the interior space from excessive southern sunlight. Furthermore, it externally constitutes the main distinctive element of the proposal. Both entrances are visually connected inside through a transparent glazed floor that aims, on the one hand, to increase the scale of the reduced dimensions of the entrance spaces and, on the other, to allow the passage of natural light from the lattice towards the ground floor.
In the interior furniture, contemporary pieces designed by Romero & Vallejo, such as the Ruff pouf for GAN or the Palma PL01 carpet for Now Carpets, coexist with design classics such as the Miguel Milá basket lamp, the Butterfly chair, the La Siesta jug, or the Acdo Pet Lamp.
At a construction level, the building sits on a perimeter concrete plinth, which is all structure, sometimes it acts as an edge beam for the pile caps and other times as a retaining wall for the thrusts of the perimeter, the street, and the foundation of the surrounding buildings.
A system of load-bearing walls is supported on this plinth, which becomes small pillars on the south façade of the building.
”On a technical level, despite its modest dimensions, it has been one of the most demanding projects we have carried out; with very difficult access, which has made its construction difficult; with the presence of archaeological remains, which have been integrated into a foundation that rests on rock and anthropic fillings simultaneously; party walls in poor condition that come off and that our building had to contain; outcrops of water in the party walls at discontinuous intervals and various locations, depending on the seasons of the year, etc. All of this has been solved by integrating into the general idea of the project, without the building showing, in any case, that “overexertion”.
Romero Vallejo.
Formalized paying attention to all the details and with intelligent use of the available materials, the house is a contemporary, calm, and sober piece of architecture. An effort to reduce to the minimum, what is strictly functional and structural, to achieve the maximum spatial quality.
