The aim of the project is to resolve the programme and the spaces for a refuge that forms part of the network of refuges run by the Departament de Sostenibilitat i Medi Ambient, with a number of beds that optimises conditions for its users, the stay shared between walkers and the people who work at the centre, the rationalisation of the building and the saving of energy. The proposal seeks to avoid the loss of this heritage through a project of restoration and re-inhabitation of the house.

Before the project, the house was made up of a heterogeneous set of systems and identifying elements belonging to successive periods which, like strata, have given rise to a mixed and valuable architecture, valuable in its capacity to crystallise in a single example the essence and authenticity of the evolution of architecture. The restoration of the house is therefore approached with a criterion different from the usual one.

The guidelines for the recovery of the building come from a criterion of constructive rationality and from a natural, plausible and unprejudiced attitude. Stability is secured and the house is supported by an exoskeleton, a kind of permanent and reversible shoring using the techniques and constructive language of the twenty-first century. It holds up what is already there without dismantling anything, safeguards every constructive piece of the house, and adds one more stratum of our own time. The structure allows an open and unprejudiced construction process, so the final form of the skeleton is the result of the rationality of that process.

On the roof the original form of Arabic tile covering has been respected. The intervention keeps the form and texture of the existing constructive elements, so that each moment in the history of the house can still be read. The purpose of the intervention is to recover the load-bearing and spatial structure of the house. The additions that altered the spatial configuration of the building are removed and the original levels recovered. The project is built from a single timber element: a pine plank of 210 x 70 mm.

Author

Mcatecnics

Photography

Alejandro Cañellas

Location

Raixa, Mallorca

Date

2021