Architect  Susana Velasco and the architect Jesús Ágreda have designed a new and unique home in Matalpino, a Spanish town belonging to El Boalo town, located in the northwestern part of the Community of Madrid, characteristic of its mountainous surroundings.

The home is conceived as a precedent for future cohousing initiatives, thanks to the connection that the project generates between the blending of sustainable materials with the environment and the difficulty of understanding the relationships between occupancy and the room.
The building incorporates ecological and bioclimatic considerations, in addition to challenging conventions about occupation and habitation. The home, “Wooden and Plastic-Free House,” is part of the cohousingflexible.org series.

No plastic
The house is built without plastic, entirely with ecological materials. Its certified wooden structure, pine wood windows and wood fiber insulation stand out. The exterior is clad in weather-resistant chestnut wood. Cross-laminated wood (CLT) comes from the first production of this material by the Spanish company Finsa.


Simbionte House by Susana Velasco and Jesús Ágreda. Photograph by Juan Baraja.

Updated tradition
The location and orientation of the home have been carefully calculated to capture the winter sun, naturally warming the interior. It stands on a stone wall, which allows it to comply with regulations, leave most of the plot free, creating a covered space under the home itself and organizing access and circulation.

Bioclimatic design is a cornerstone of the project. This incorporates traditional knowledge and adapts it to new ways of living, such as the creation of a "climate bubble" that thermoregulates the environment without the need for external systems. Each façade responds both to the conditions of the terrain and climate and to the interior use of each space. On the roof, oriented solar panels have been installed to capture maximum solar radiation.


Simbionte House by Susana Velasco and Jesús Ágreda. Photograph by Juan Baraja.

Innovation in Resource Management
A notable aspect is efficient water management. The project incorporates a rainwater collection system for use in the garden. In addition, the stainless steel pipes minimize the use of plastics, aligning with the ecological philosophy of the project.

The future and cohousing
The project establishes crucial precedents for future cohousing initiatives, aligning design and sustainability with the environment, developing common spaces that can simultaneously generate private uses or encounters with oneself.

A model to follow
The “Wood and Plastic Free House” project is not only a testament to sustainable and bioclimatic architecture but also a model to follow in terms of collaborative design, efficiency in the use of resources and respect for the environment. It represents a milestone in green construction, demonstrating that it is possible to live in harmony with nature without sacrificing comfort and modern style.

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Architects
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Dates
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2022.
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Location
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Matalpino, Madrid, Spain.
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Photography
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Susana Velasco is a doctoral architect, artist and professor at the Department of Architectural Graphic Ideation at the School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Madrid since 2009. She has been a visiting professor at the L'école d'architecture et Paysage schools in Bordeaux and Toulouse.

She lives and works between Spain and France, a country where in addition to the Time Ship in Bordeaux (2021), she has made Prototype n.1 of the Poïpoïdrome Flottante (2022) in collaboration with the artist Céline Domengie.

Her career begins with Luddotek (2004-2011), a certainly impudent project that explored - between the scenic and the political - the powers of childhood in the company of Rafael Sánchez-Mateos; with whom she continues to work today from Operaciones Cunctatio in diversified format projects such as the recent Lo vivo, lo pueblo, lo jondo: Geopsiquias del Albaicín. Her works, alone and collectively, have been exhibited and recognized in different places and art centers such as MUSAC, documenta in Kassel or MNCARS.

From an impure position between architecture and action, Susana Velasco investigates the medial places that architecture can occupy as a link between bodies and the landscape they inhabit, in projects such as the Solar Chamber of Santo Isidro de Herreruela, the Small Communal Museum in Almonaster, the work From scattered fragments (MUSAC 2017) or The Time Ship in Bordeaux. Through a scale and forms always missed, his works seek to give materiality to a poetics of the common world that we inhabit, collecting the witness of the ancient communal ones and exploring how to link ourselves in other ways with objectologies, other beings, and the land we walk on. .

In addition to artistic works, he carries out sensitive and ecological architecture projects, teaming up with companies and professionals involved in an ecological approach, such as the recent Casa Simbionte, a completely ecological home in structural wood and a prototype for a way of life integrated into its environment.
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Published on: April 1, 2024
Cite: "Precedent for cohousing. Simbionte House by Susana Velasco and Jesús Ágreda" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/precedent-cohousing-simbionte-house-susana-velasco-and-jesus-agreda> ISSN 1139-6415
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