• Building in Brick 1/4

  H Arquitectes
  

   

   

   

   

  Barcelona, Spain
  

  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?

   

   

  »Well, we love many other materials too, but you are right, we love to work with brick. For these three houses, we were looking for a material that could serve both as structure and surface, so we would not need any additional layers. We are constantly preoccupied with a spatial concept we call “espacio estructura”, meaning that all the spaces in our buildings are defined by the load-bearing structure itself.

   «

   

   

  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?

   

  »Brick is an essential part of our vernacular and traditional construction. I think this could be said for the entire Mediterranean culture. Despite the savage economic crisis, there are still a lot of brick factories in Catalonia and almost all building companies know how to work with masonry techniques. So, in this way, brick is one of the most traditional and deeply rooted construction technologies here.« I
  

   

  About H Arquitectes

   

• COVER

  COVER

  Cover

  Bricks
• Table of contents

  Table of contents
• EDITORIAL

  EDITORIAL

  Editorial

  Bricks
• ESSAY

  ESSAY

  A Brick in the Stomach

  Max Borka on the home-loving Belgians

  Text: Max Borka
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Trümmerfrauen

  The women who cleared the debris of Berlin

  Text: Fiona Shipwright
• VIEWPOINT

  VIEWPOINT

  H Architectes, Barcelona, Spain

  Architects on building in brick 1/4

  Text: Florian Heilmeyer
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Walls of Faith

  Arthur Shoosmith’s New Delhi church

  Text: Rob Wilson
• VIEWPOINT

  VIEWPOINT

  Baumschlager Eberle, Lustenau, Austria

  Architects building in brick 2/4

  Text: Florian Heilmeyer
• ESSAY

  ESSAY

  Catching the Curve

  Eladio Dieste and the brick by Florencia Rodríguez

  Text: Florencia Rodríguez
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Collective Constructs

  Olafur Eliasson’s Collectivity Project

  Text: Sophie Lovell
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Wall-E

  Gramazio & Kohler’s masonry robots

  Text: Fiona Shipwright
• FOCUS

  FOCUS

  Trapped by History

  The new genre of stylish salvage

  Text: Sara Faezypour, Sophie Lovell, Rob Wilson
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Breaking Point

  On the art of blowing up buildings

  Text: Fiona Shipwright
• VIEWPOINT

  VIEWPOINT

  Sergison Bates Architects, London, UK

  Architects on building in brick 3/4

  Text: Rob Wilson
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Blood Bricks

  Child labour in the kilns of Nepal

  Text: Pete Pattisson
• VIEWPOINT

  VIEWPOINT

  Onion, Bangkok, Thailand

  Architects on building in brick 4/4

  Text: Fiona Shipwright
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Masonry Maximus

  A pile of palaces in Ancient Rome

  Text: Rob Wilson
• PHOTO BOOTH

  PHOTO BOOTH

  In the Photo Booth with...

  Wolf D. Prix

  Text: Philipp Sturm
• KLAUSTOON

  KLAUSTOON

  Klaustoon

  XX. Another Brick in the World
• NEXT

  NEXT

  Next

  Uncanny Valley

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