Housing building Ferrocarril 4bis by Israel Alba

Description of project by Israel Alba

The building is located in the center of Madrid, slightly to the south. Only a few minutes walking from Atocha Train Station, El Retiro and Madrid Río parks, the so called Paseo del Arte (Reina Sofía, Prado and Thyssen-Bornemisza museums) and Caixa Forum and Matadero cultural centers. It is a consolidated area of the city that is being transformed, starting to renovate its old residential, industrial and commercial buildings linked with the railways. Amazon and Repsol have located their headquarters in this area because of its strategic position and its good connections. All this confers a new hybrid and cosmopolitan role to this fragment of the city, vibrant, full of life and activity.

It is a plot between party walls, long and narrow, with south orientation, that was occupied in the past by a building from the beginning of the XXth century. Its bad condition suggested the demolition. In this way, we propose an architecture that fills a gap inside an urban block, a building that suggests ambiguous connections between public and private life, that participates in the urban and social scene, that it doesn’t prevail, that is no longer entirely seen and it becomes camouflaged with the background of the city.   

In the access, a lattice unifies the whole front of the building towards the street and defines a veiled hallway that articulates the three main programs: housing entrance hall, parking and office. Across this intermediate place between public and private, between outside and inside, space increases in horizontal discovering a new gradual connection between the street and the courtyard, highlighting the importance of both scenarios of the city life, establishing a new continuation between both.   

It is in this ground floor space, long, deep and varied, where the most unique organizational qualities get revealed. The structure is shifted to the party walls and disappears. Then, the space, its continuation and the different articulations turn into protagonist. This action, taken to all the storeys of the building, develops two important characteristics of the building: its condition of domestic infrastructure and the unique nature of the front facade. This is due to the fact that the structure doesn’t appear like a material that takes up and defines the space, but it is limited to its supporting capacity to allow different ways of inhabiting architecture in its interior. We find ourselves in front of a smooth space, defined by slabs and party walls, completed in the ends with more sophisticated facades. We get, this way, a deep and compact building, well illuminated and well ventilated, that reduces to the minimum the energy exchange between the interior and the environment.

Each floor is occupied by a single programmatic unit, materializing the idea of living in an elevated house located in the center of the city. The versatility that provides a structure-free space allows for inhabiting the interior in different ways, adaptting to the necessities of every family unit. At the top, a two-storey house inverting the traditional spatial organization, takes advantage of the setback imposed by local regulations to use it as a terrace, from where to contemplate wonderful views of the city.

The facade works as an energetic diaphragm defined by different layers that occupy the whole front. The delimitation of this relationship is complex and its configuration varied. From the exterior limit in the street to the interior of the enclosure, these layers made of complementary materials are unfolded to control ligth, ventilation, privacy and landscape. These layers, made of graduable blinds, railings, windows and curtains develop the idea of a facade to an enclosure as an energetic gradient, which is characterized by its versatility. Thus, this limit attracts the domestic activity that habitually is retracted to the interior, showing all its potential as an intensely occupied spaces.   

The influence of the existing surroundings is materialized in this building placing a particular emphasis on the party walls, orientation and street performance, making that the building response emerges as the intensification of the urban condition and not as a mere insertion of a volume in a gap.