-
Architects: bRijUNi Architects
- Year: 2014
Text description provided by the architects. Just when the great construction crisis began, we still had the opportunity to work on two housing projects of different scales in a very poor area of the old town of Jaen: the district of San Juan. The first was already published by Plataforma Arquitectura and ArchDaily: http://www.plataformaarquitectura.cl/cl/02-89897/dos-viviendas-en-la-calle-soria-de-san-juan-de-jaen-brijuni-arquitectos so we just refer to it in parallel to what has been recently completed and published below.
This second building occupies a strange and very unique plot of over six hundred square meters just two hundred meters away from the previous project. The area of the plot is ten times larger so we can develop an ambitious program of twelve houses around a large courtyard with swimming pool over two garage floors. The typologies range from one to four bedrooms and regulations require a great spatial complexity for each of the homes to have a main bedroom overlooking the courtyard so that the project is not considered interior housing, a typology that is not allowed. If the effort to provide great spatial intensity with double heights and lit and ventilated semi-buried plans is necessary, we wish for the colorful facade, challenging the monotonous and constructive regulations, and the existing rich chromatic diversity in the surroundings, to become the protagonist of such a unified but not individualized project where the sense of community overlaps with the individual houses and the economic effort is concentrated in a protective and efficient skin beyond the usual solutions that skimp on resources and turn modest housing in environments such as San Juan into real traps for their inhabitants.
The work of the architect, never the case of an exercise in personal or introspective style, abounds in the possibility of proposing scenarios of encounter for people living in buildings and thus making communities that are the first social circles, beyond the family, which should be raised as new scenarios of everyday life and society and of project of cohesion from the need referred to by Peter Singer as "to widen our circle."
To transcend the stereotypes of social and human relationships is something that architecture is required to do. In the case of San Juan neighborhood in the city of Jaén, we think that a largely poor population does not deserve an architecture of poor quality and that it was our duty to suggest architectures that speak of mixofilia in a place where there was, on the contrary, some mixophobia, in both directions. The fear of living with strangers or those who are different from us begins in the shared courtyard, in the neighbors yard or pool and is manifested in a spatially anf chromatically committed and purposeful architecture.
