The project is located in the urban center of Guimerà, in the l’Urgell region (Catalonia), a town of medieval origin. Narrow streets, arcades, vaults, and stairs form an urban morphology of significant heritage interest. Throughout its history, Guimerà has based its economy on agriculture, scattering a series of buildings across the surrounding territory that supported this activity. The project proposes the rehabilitation of one of these disused buildings.
Reprogramming
The project proposes the rehabilitation of an agricultural warehouse, reprogrammed as “senior” co-housing. In order to fit two family units into the same building, the lifestyle of each individual was studied, identifying their routines, concerns, and project desires. This allowed the home spaces to be planned and reorganized according to each use, taking into account the degree of collectivization required at different moments. Spaces for individuals, couples, communal areas, and even neighborhood spaces emerged.
Rescaling
The pre-existing structure consisted of a large open-plan volume with two floors, functioning as a warehouse (First Floor) and agricultural machinery garage (Ground Floor). Therefore, in addition to a change of use, the project must address a change in scale. Using a central earthen core, consisting of three tall volumes, the program is reorganized, creating spaces of a domestic scale.
Recollectivize
On the ground floor, in contact with the street and the garden, the more communal uses are planned: kitchen, living room, dining room, shared bathroom, and a large multipurpose open space. On the first floor, the more private spaces are located: bedrooms and individual bathrooms. The program follows a “privacy gradient in height,” where the two wooden mezzanines can accommodate complementary uses depending on the moment.
Reequip
The central core incorporates the vertical circulations, services, and installations of the house: fireplace, stairs, bathrooms, kitchen, laundry room, and machine room. All installations are derived from this central core, equipping each of the spaces.
Recomfort
The project bets on earth as a material that regulates interior habitability. The large surface area of the interior walls regulates ambient humidity, provides significant thermal inertia and balance, and contributes to acoustic comfort between different spaces.
On the other hand, the project incorporates bioclimatic strategies such as solar capture, natural ventilation, or air stratification in order to reduce energy consumption and improve passive comfort conditions. The ground floor is extended to the buildable limit at ground level, creating an accessible level to the street and garden. This new volume, related to the garden and views, has the right height to allow solar radiation to enter the ground floor. This building is topped with a green roof, which, in addition to providing good thermal performance, serves as a garden at the mezzanine level of the ground floor.
Repopulate
The users adopt an active and combative attitude towards rural depopulation. The manual skills of the different members who make up the co-housing are considered as a draw for the rest of the neighbors in the village. For this reason, the co-housing, in addition to responding to different privacy gradients, defining private and intimate spaces, as well as collective and communal areas, also had to integrate the possibility of hosting more public spaces where the life of the residents of this home would provide an example of sustainable living integrated with the village.
