An urban refuge. Patio-house in Salou, Salou, Tarragona, Spain, 2018-2021
It couldn’t have been much different in Ur 5,000 years ago: the same painstakingly created bricks… the same spaces around a courtyard, the same walls, the same transition from light to dark, the same cold after heat, the same starry nights, same fears, same dream …” Aldo van Eyck.
The house is located in an urbanization on the outskirts of Salou that is articulated around the Archaeological Park of Villa Romana de Barenys, a building from the 1st century BC. destined to be the production place of ceramics for the construction and the elaboration of amphorae, used to export Tarragona wine to different parts of the Empire.
In continuity with the culture of the patios and the way of living in Mediterranean climates, recovering the latent memory of the Roman villas that articulated the agricultural territory of the Ager Tarraconensis around the Roman Salauris, a city known for its strategic port, and with the intention of evoking the childhood experiences of Maria José among the vegetal shadows, the pools and the orange trees of the Andalusian patios, a patio house is proposed, an introspective house that welcomes an oasis inside.
The house is articulated through a single fluid space on the ground floor that gravitates around an atrium, the central room of the house. The project focuses on the timeless exploration of living between the interior and the exterior, between the dark and the bright, between uncertainty and security.
The agora, which opens to the southeast in search of light, is the center of the house, the stage where all the rooms converge, the collective place, the space for relationships, and at the same time, it is also an intermediate space of control.
The house is structured from the access axis on the northwest façade, which is materialized through the spatial sequence formed by the entrance porch, the hall, the exterior porch, and the central patio. This access route leads directly to the outside, making it hardly possible to guess where the house begins.
Architect: NUA arquitectures (Maria Rius, Arnau Tiñena, Ferran Tiñena)Design Team: Technical architects: Albert Vilà i Júlia Oriol / Structural calculation: Albert Pujol / Engineering: Enric SanzClient: Maria José & JosepPhotographer: Adrià Goula
