Seeing them coming. Lives, memories, actions by MGM Arquitectos

Description of project by MGM Arquitectos

A body crosses the spaces, introducing life beyond the memory and the geometry of the spaces. The holes drilled in the floors, ceilings, and walls showed memory as freedom, not as enclosure or self-absorption. Some of this is what Gordon Matta-Clark intended in his "Splitting, cutting, writing, drawing...". He knew how to associate memory and space without resorting to the language of objects, nor to narratives pinned to any wall: he only resorted to the relationship between spaces and bodies.

To intervene in a pre-existing house should be to experience a new time; it would be a matter of enabling bodies and spaces at the same time. Spaces are redefined by the actions developed during everyday life. Comings and goings. Anatomy of a space. This project work begins with the drilling of a dividing wall shared by two houses in the historic centre of Seville, intending to make the extension of one house towards the other functionally viable. On the other hand, a connection is established on the ground floor between two streets (Calle Palacios Malaver and Calle Peris Mencheta), thus initiating a half-domestic, half-urban crossing that will change over time. Almost the entire project has consisted, both in the drawing stage and in that of the work, of "going on a visit" from one house to the other and vice versa. When we go to visit, we are received and, in a way, rehoused. One house had to be re-housed in the other.

Through the steps from one side of each house to the other, a kind of threshold space was formed between the two. This threshold is the one we wanted to be experienced in each interior transit, in each crossing from one room to the others. Whichever house is the house of origin, the other becomes its threshold, a welcoming space. One house serves as a welcome to the other, becoming a memory of those who come. From this threshold, a vertical lantern, captured from the memory of the foyers of the madrasas of Islamic architecture, becomes an indiscreet eye through which all lives pass: from one house to the other. Rooms: Seeing them coming. The lantern is the backdrop for the new rooms, as well as their preamble. An ambulatory wedged between the walls of one house and another. The walls of the old houses are rehabilitated to configure 3 autonomous, superimposed rooms, which look out onto the street in different ways. The relationship of these rooms with the street organizes the program. The lower room contains a studio bedroom and the upper room forms a pair of interlinked rooms, in which special attention is paid to the heritage environment visible from the inside. These three rooms do not propose a fluid, modern space, but seek to stabilize the moments while waiting for domestic events.

From the lives that pass through these places, crossing from one house to another, looking through the steps, through the windows, the residents will spontaneously appear, crossing glances and greetings, almost as if waiting: "seeing them coming". This house will be inhabited by a couple and their two daughters. From time to time they negotiate who occupies which place, and where the next meeting will take place.