CASA DOLMEN - Ferrer Soler, Gaspar · Arquitecto

Located in the city of Alicante, Casa Dolmen has been planned with a clear and emphatic idea in mind, noticeable in its volumetric formalization, its distribution and its completion, with the objective of making space the most important thing.

The house looks towards being seen as an essential cottage, composed by vertical elements which support a horizontal slab, which leads to an architectural space with absolute uniformity, a megalithic monument, tectonic, dolmen made with stone slabs.

Recovering and adapting some of the concepts of classic architecture, the house, which is a Temple, supports itself on a podium, which is a Crepidoma and an element of transition between the natural terrain and the interior of the house.

The duality that is created between the covered outdoor space, generated by an aerial and rhythmic colonnade in the main façade in the form of a loggia, and the solid and three-dimensional wide wall at the back, limits the sequence of the main rooms.

Using concrete, with its formworks and its textures, a timeless and sincere, naked and convincing, expressive and monumental architecture is suggested, which is rescued, intentionally, from the fluctuation of likes.

The house is planned on a cornered site, located in the neighbourhood of Vistahermosa, in the outskirts of the city of Alicante.

Immersed in a surrounding that is defined by buildings of the same typology, single-family isolated homes with one or two floors each, the house tries to break monotony and respond to the place in a different manner than what is already in its vicinity.

The house is aware of the place, it settles on it and tries, simply, to enclose space.

A building that reflects, at all time and in a very obvious manner, a determined idea is proposed. An idea that is conceptual, unique and clear.   An idea than englobes the general volumetric configuration, the disposition of the programme and the material’s definition and the structure of the house.

The project has as an objective to elevate architecture to its spacial condition. This is why only spacialities are planned. The house tries to get a more abstract and stimulant perception of space as habitable material. Space is proposed, in all ways, as the determining factor of the construction.

The architecture that is proposed in Casa Dolmen steps away radically of the domestic model in use, reducing its elements to the most basic necessities without endangering functionality. It is a model space for a more simple way of life,   definitively, of a residential house that has nothing to do with conventional houses.

As if it were a megalithic monument, tectonic dolmen made out with stone slabs. The house tries to be perceived as an essential cottage made up by vertical elements, called ortostatos, which support a horizontal slab, which leads to an architectural space with absolute uniformity.

It is all about adapting the preceding history of the Greek temple, combining its fundamental principles such as the likes for strength, for orthogonality in planes and sections and, especially, its fluidity in spaces, with the abstraction and simplicity of visual vocabulary.

The house, which is a Temple, supports itself on a podium, which is a Crepidoma and an element of transition between the secular world, the natural floor, the terrain, and the sacred world of the home, which is the proper house.

It would also be, an element that, thrust into the terrain, at the same time as it saves the little slope that is present in the plot, raises the house to its monumental character.

In the main façade, a rhythmic and iconic colonnade, in the form of a loggia, generates a covered exterior space, sunny and mediterranean,   which also works as a filter between the natural space and the interior.

A series of skylights, intentionally overlapped on both floors, reference the tectonic again, dematerializing and making this porticoed space and the elements that make it up clear.

Skylights that generate vertical light, which suggest a combination of lights and shadows, giving the space movement and energy.

In the interior certain accuracy and essentiality are accomplished, as there are no servant nor served spaces.

Duality is created between the loggia, light, permeable, dynamic, dematerialized…, and the wide wall at the back, heavy, impassable, static…, and between them the main rooms, which, oriented, take over all of the exterior space.

This wide wall, uninterrupted all around the house, in an attempt to reduce its formal aggressiveness, is covered with wood to humanize its contact with the main rooms, which it delimits.

The spaces project each other and relate between them through the ones before creating large alignments.

Similar spaces are planned which differentiate from each other only by the action of light and their different uses.

In conclusion, open but austere spaces are generated, giving the house a sense of fake simplicity which is functional and has practical sense.

The double-floor height generated in the living spaces, as a surprise effect on the transition between spaces, vertically joins the base floor with the superior one, and articulates, horizontally, the more private area with the public one.

And in this double-floor space, a concrete staircase, with an uneven cross section, brutal in its material nature, sculptural and suspended, which is a nexus that joins both worlds, the inferior, of continued and prolonged usage, and the superior, destined towards rest.

The natural light that comes in vertically through the skylights of the loggia, goes through the carved gaps in the wall of the façade filling the interior spaces with clarity, which shows, by its materialization, the pass of time.

This is an architecture that is composed with the naturalness of what is necessary, decisive, austere, where the desire of directly projecting and bluntly prevails.

And it is concrete (HA-30/F/12/IIIa – HA-30/B/20/IIa), paradigmatic material of our century, rigorous, expressive, naked, noble, monumental, sincere, that saves us from the fluctuation of likes, that emphasizes through its many diverse textures, that pretended formalization of the elements that make up the house volumetrically.

It does not only show the material in itself but also the element that is contained in it and gives it shape, a formwork made up of horizontal wooden planks which leads to an imperfect and texturized concrete, able to register the patina of time.

It is, in conclusion, architecture full of enrichening poverty, which combines what is visible to make what is invisible clear, and that makes common sense, the most common of all senses.

Arquitecto / Architect: Gaspar Ferrer Soler - GASPARFERRER estudio · Interiorismo / Interior design: Gaspar Ferrer Soler

Año de proyecto y construcción / Year of the Project and construction: 2017-2019 · Ubicación / Location: Alicante 

Fotografía / Photography: David Frutos.