Aixopluc . photos: © José Hevia
Acknowledging and maintaining the value of self-built, fragile outdoor light structures that populate a magic yard built by ancestors. A triple house, one indoors, one outdoors, one where porches become the core that keeps past, present and future kin together.
Kinship of a lost rural time.
A very big hidden plot at a five minute walk from the centre of Reus. In the middle of the site, a self-built country house. In the beginning, it was in the rural outskirts of town. Some worker’s retreat to spend weekends, summers, and grow vegetables. Since then, it has been surrounded by all sorts of suburban and urban constructions. It still keeps its quiet, peasant atmosphere. The presence of quite tall apartment blocks on the northern and north-western side protects the site from the strong Mestral winds, and shades it during the hot summer afternoons. Surrounded by this slight geological ring, a microclimate unfolds. We could take advantage of our neighbour’s accidental gift by using some lighter construction techniques and opening up towards the western sun. In here, the city erases more than it builds, and it shelters more than it civilises.
The JEC´s late parents bought this mas many years ago. They spent the second part of their life taking care of it. The father, using his skills as a watchmaker, patiently assembled additions, welding, screwing and growing all kinds of rooms, huts, shacks, sheds, porches, fig trees, clocks, strange plants, mono radios and shades: An outdoors abode, a second house around the former one-floor self-built construction. The house was in a perpetual state of construction, a never-ending laborious enjoyment for its dwellers. And then in 2016 the father died, and the place was empty.
From the House of youth to their last home.
A year after the father’s passing, the son, his wife and daughter -the JECs- decided to move back in. Their only initial wish was that they wanted to live on a ground floor. The site is big enough for a single-storey house, so they don’t have to go up and down the stairs when they get old. The existing mas had two floors, a flat roof -a terrat– on top, an underground cellar, and many shacks and porches, none complying with any code. The JECs first question was whether it was better to keep the mas, or to demolish it and build a brand new structure instead?
JEC is an acronym made with the three inhabitant’s names, but it also means winter coat in Catalan.
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