卡斯特拉尔大厦丨西班牙马德里丨SOLAR

Architects:Solar

Photographs:Adriá Goula

Lead Architects:Pablo Canga, Ana Herreros

Collaborators:Luis Guerra

Technical Architect:Ángel García

Construction:Edite Transforma

Furniture Designer:Solar

Lighting Design:PanaLed

Lanscape Design:Blom Bureau

City:Madrid

Country:Spain

“To restore an edifice means neither to maintain it, nor to repair it, nor to rebuild it; it means to reinstate it in a finished state, which may in fact have never existed at any given time.” Eugène Viollet le-Duc. Building on the Built Cities and buildings have many lives. For decades a lack of feeling for the remains of the past, the incapacity to see them as depositories of collective memory, has contributed to the destruction of our built heritage. The erosion of our built history has led to a pendular reaction and the sacralization of heritage, the freezing of the object in time, sometimes without the rigor that such a crystallization would deserve. Casa Castelar is an ideological and aesthetic exercise on how to incorporate the memory and entropy of the already existing – taking advantage of thermodynamic and informational capital – into a contemporary project, from an angle having little to do with dogmatic preservation.

Typological Recovery - Carried out in the 19th century outside the capital, the Madrid Moderno development comprised ninety-six houses designed in accordance with hygienist ideas of the garden-city, of which barely fourteen have survived the real-estate strain that has pressed upon the neighborhood since the 1970s. The commission involved refurbishing one of them, the deficient state of which made it necessary to redo the structure behind the listed facade. In the knowledge that the site’s heritage value lay beyond neo-Mudejar bonds and the distinctive lookout in front, we opted to recover the building’s original scheme. Thanks to a series of strategic operations and demolitions, which eliminated additions that had crowded the plot, the 1890 layout of an L around a courtyard reappeared, containing the new program. The interior is characterized by the concatenation of regular rooms connected by large voids to the stairwell, generating crossed views as one ascends but without causing any loss of visual references, which remain constant.

Craftmanship vs. Technology - While the front was reconstructed in accordance with classical restoration procedures – whereby templates are drawn up, woodwork is done manually, and traditional crafts are harnessed, all at a slow pace – the rear facade was given large openings and a skin of recycled aluminum perforated and cut by numerical control. This lightweight system facilitated construction and ensured easier maintenance, as well as any dismantling and reuse in the future. With such duality – tradition vs. innovation, craft vs. industry – the house has two contrasting facades. It is a Janus with the countenance of another time, concealing behind it a face of the future. Ecological Ethics - Because buildings of the past are valuable caches of materials, energy, and human effort, the task of transforming them becomes an ecological imperative bound to re-shape our built landscape. While preserving existing elements, the project has put in bioclimatic strategies and systems – thermal insulation, new joineries, aerothermal solutions, and the optimization of cross ventilation – that have reduced energy consumption by over 70%.

Consciente de que el valor patrimonial reside más allá de los aparejos neomudéjares y el distintivo mirador, el proyecto apuesta por la restitución del esquema original de casa. Gracias a una serie de intervenciones y demoliciones estratégicas, que eliminaron los añadidos que colmataban la parcela, se logró recuperar la tipología de 1890 en L en torno a un patio alrededor del cual se distribuye el programa. A nivel espacial, el interior se caracteriza por la concatenación de estancias regulares conectadas mediante grandes huecos con la caja de la escalera, dando lugar a una serie de vistas cruzadas que acompañan el ascenso sin perder la referencia visual constante tanto entre ellas como con el patio.

Artesanía vs tecnología. Mientras que la fachada exterior se rehabilitó siguiendo modelos clásicos de restauración, donde la elaboración de plantillas, la ebanistería artesanal y la recuperación de oficios tradicionales se desarrollaron a un ritmo lento; en la fachada trasera se recortaron grandes huecos y se revistió con una piel de aluminio reciclado, perforado y cortado por control numérico. Este sistema constructivo ligero facilitó la instalación, así como el posible desmantelamiento, reutilización y mantenimiento en el futuro. La dualidad entre tradición e innovación, y artesanía e industrialización aplicadas en ambas fachadas, dotan a la vivienda de dos frentes de marcado contraste. Un Jano con rostro de otro tiempo detrás del que se esconde otro fijo en el porvenir.

Ética ecológica. Los edificios del pasado son valiosos depósitos que acumulan materiales, energía y esfuerzo humano, por lo que su transformación se erige como un imperativo ecológico que, sin duda, dará forma a nuestro paisaje construido. Además de la conservación de elementos existentes, se han implantado estrategias y sistemas bioclimáticos —aislamiento térmico, nuevas carpinterías, instalación de aero-termia y la optimización de la ventilación cruzada — que han permitido reducir el consumo energético en más de un 70%.

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