Nahinuena House | 2024

In a residential area of ​​fenced plots whose greatest value is not yet occupied, this house is located, seeking its project responses in its topographic conditions. Narrow and long, neither excavated nor on rubble plinths, the house sits seeking to levitate, maintaining beneath it the pronounced natural slope of the land and meticulously placing its supports, seeking the rocky stratum.

From here there is little more to say.

Although, supported by the fact that few will launch into the reading of this text, we will venture to fly over the project. We believe that a large part of the architectural dispute of our days is in the fixed position in front of the construction, beyond formal capacities, in the choice and work with the materials. Without romanticizing, in the virtue of being, without mannerisms of the rigging or self-absorbed worlds of plasterboard. In being, with little and pride.

Without further ado, I hope Nahinuena can be and make its wonderful inhabitants be.

Nahinuena is a project about wood. This is structure, interior, exterior, flooring, forging and furniture. But it is not just another catalogue of wood in different formats, but it also precisely explores the relationship between wood and use for minimum material consumption. The interior porticos work in traction, avoiding buckling, making it possible to build them with minimal sawn timber squares, the panels stabilise the light framework and are shown as a façade or interior cladding, the forging is resolved with laminated beams and a wood chip board that minimises the carbon footprint.

But housing cannot be understood without other axes of internalities such as territory and energy. Above all, implementation, with a precise location on the plot from the understanding of it as a piece of landscape and its desire in a parceled neighborhood to free all the natural substrate, maintain original topography that collects rainfall, reinforce its natural vegetation and recover the nearby stream and wetland with the maximum contribution of water.

Nahinuena (The desired one in Basque), as its owner baptized it, is an attempt to relate material and territory, wood and stone, wood and landscape. The boards are produced locally, they are heat-treated in a nearby workshop, the wood is cut and prepared from pine plantations in the area and the assembly teams, installers and carpenters are specialists in farmhouse roofs. But not only a material relationship between territory and construction, but a more important one such as the symbolic one. There is no real change without a dream. For this reason, the project’s focus on building a new idea of ​​the popular, a new idea of ​​tradition, of local specificity.

that invites the collective appropriation of new ways of building. The separation of its romantic nature and its playful and unprejudiced mixture of the real, the pretended and the crude imitation is what is sought here. A popular, open and slightly punk tradition. For there is no better fixer of change than beauty.

Category:Multi-Family HousingLocation:Gorliz, Bizkaia, SpainArchitect: Ane Arce Urtiaga, SpainDesign Team: Ane Arce, Iñigio Berasategui, Julene LarreaPhotographer: Luis Díaz Díaz