Iñigo Beguiristain . Lecumberri & Cidoncha . photos: © Iñaki Bergera . + AV
The starting point is a single requirement, a one-story house, on a small and almost square plot, with one of its sides open to a narrow street. The environment, a low density rural nucleus typical of the South of Navarre, is characterized by the heterogeneity of its buildings, with the uprooted aridity and the washed out tones of its facades as the only binding agent of the urban discourse. In this context, the strategy is based on the negation of the area, with a subtly muted facade and the vindication of the new architecture to provide interest and environmental quality to an introverted dwelling that looks at itself.
Illuminated by the evocative image of the Roman Impluvium, the project is inevitably structured around a courtyard. A void that replicates and regularizes the autonomous geometry of the original site and, as an urban die, seeks to dynamize and articulate the domestic space. A clear structure, suggested by Kahn, establishes a clear hierarchy for the different uses of the house. The service rooms are cornered off at the four apex, freeing up the spaces with the best lighting and ventilation for the noblest rooms of the program. The movable walls of glass and wood animate the continuous succession of spaces, open and closed, covered or not, in which the limits are definitely diluted when the courtyard occasionally opens onto the street and introduces the village into the house.
This act of opening inspires the construction and materiality of the house. The brick that dresses half of the facades of Cintruénigo extends along the floor and walls, forming a homogeneous base with a clear stereotomic identity. Its condition of exterior envelope abounds in the idea of spatial continuity and dissolution of the limits, increasing the feeling of spaciousness of the interior enclosures. The essential presence of wood occasionally interrupts the continuity of the masonry to resolve partitions, providing the necessary warmth to the home. In another order, an arcaded structure of reinforced concrete rests on the perimeter load-bearing walls, revealing its tectonic nature, and supports the roof.
Understood in continuity with the facades of the courtyard, it assumes all the expressiveness that is denied to the main façade. Thus, crowning the construction, a zinc sheet rests naturally on the obliquities of the roof and effectively resolves the folds of its complex volumetry, demonstrating a clear desire for dematerialization and decontextualization.
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