The young Spanish practice H Arquitectes likes to build in brick – but their houses are anything but domestic. Partner Xavier Ros Majó explains their passion for clay.
Three of the single-family-houses your office has designed
make heavy use of brick. Is this a favourite material of yours?
Casa 712 in Barcelona was completed in 2011. Based on a triangular floor plan, the house features a façade of two layers of bricks, with the structural wall inside (in order to avoid thermal bridges) while the bricks of the exterior wall were turned on their sides with their holes facing outside; this way the façade is ventilated and there is a cavity that easily drains the water thanks to the bricks’ geometry. (All photos by: Adrià Goula)
Casa 1014 in Granollers, Barcelona, was completed in 2014. The plot is 53 metres long yet only 6.5 metres wide. Making use of the entire length, H arquitectes split the house into two parts, placing them at each end of the plot thus creating a very long patio in the middle. The structural bricks were left visible, their different sizes and structure giving a hint of their varying functions as aesthetic, load-bearing and/or thermal elements.
H Arquitectes is an architecture studio established in 2000 and based in Sabadell, Barcelona. The studio is managed by four partner architects: David Lorente Ibáñez (Granollers, *1972), Josep Ricart Ulldemolins (Cerdanyola del Vallès, *1973), Xavier Ros Majó (Sabadell, *1972) and Roger Tudó Galí (Terrassa, *1973). All of them licensed between 1998 and 2000 in the E.T.S.A. Vallès. They have lectured across Europe and America and their works have been recognised with several awards and have also been featured in several exhibitions.
www.harquitectes.com
Despite its universality as a material, do you see brick
as a particularly indigenous material in Spain?
PRODUCT GROUP
MANUFACTURER
New and existing Tumblr users can connect with uncube and share our visual diary.
Uncube is brandnew and wants to look good.
For best performance please update your browser.
Mozilla Firefox,
Internet Explorer 10 (or higher),
Safari,
Chrome,
Opera