Project Description
[Text submitted by the Architect] The house was already there, located in the small city of Orlandia, with its urban fabric made by an 80m side square block, divided typically by 10x40m lots, which are basically occupied by one single floor single houses.
They were living in that house for about twenty years when they called us to remodel their own house. What was missing? In their opinion, informed by an everyday experience: a more generous and light living room and dining room; a music room; gardens and a swimming pool.
We suggested them to keep the house itself, just suppressing its inclined tiled roof. Or better, to suppress the tiles but keeping the horizontal concrete slab that was there working just a simple ceiling [It is a quite common and totally meaningless redundant roof which started when concrete slab became really cheap assuming the position of wood ceiling in the traditional construction].
That new flat roof suggested a floor. Up there the boundaries of the lot seemed to disappear, from that new platform one could look over the tiled roof of the low rise buildings spread out the city easily reaching the rural landscape surrounding the city toward east, south and west.
Technically the remaining slab was not supposed to support a floor overload. But this was easy to solve: the new floor doesn’t touch the slab. It was made in wood on wood beams which rest on the top of the existing walls that were surmounted by a concrete beam, as a ring. Part of that new platform was roofed to make the new living and dining room. The roof followed the same criteria, it didn’t touch the remaining slab or even the house itself: a steel framework, as a gantry, whose foots touch the ground on the party wall. A light steel roof and its MDF ceiling were hung from the framework. A wood pergola associated with a vertical awning shade east and west façades; besides a wood louver filters the light on north and south façades.
Traditionally a living room is located in the ground level. In such situation it can be extended outside to verandas towards gardens and swimming pool. In that situation there was no ground, the traditional house had been sort of upside down. Strictly following to answer the programmatic requested, more garden and swimming pool, we could mitigate that groundless situation of the living room by placing and elevated swimming pool at the east side and a suspended garden at the west side. Underneath the pool, a music room was arranged; while the garden shelters up two cars.
The house was preserved, they are still sleeping at the same bedrooms they used to do. But some pieces were added to make a new whole, a remodeled house.
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