210. Apartment in Madrid

The project, seeks to build a cabin for two people among the city’s trees — a wooden cabin with as many layers as an onion. It is designed as a tribute to other simple rural spaces of Extremadura, reinterpreted in a more elaborate way within the interior of an urban residential building.

The merging of two small apartments creates an opportunity to experiment with strategies for grading domestic spaces in an urban environment located in a highly intense area: the intersection of the monarchical axis, an East-West axis that once connected the winter and summer palaces, and the city’s modern axis, extending northward from the Paseo del Prado.

The intervention in this built environment is based on establishing a set of diversified domesticity bands, transitioning from the public space of the Paseo del Prado to the private space of intimacy.
In the first band of this domestic gradient, perhaps the most important, lies the space situated between the treetops of the grand avenue and the façade of the existing building. This public space, imbued with a dynamic atmosphere, is appropriated by the resulting apartment.

Between the exterior and interior spaces, the narrow balconies incorporate filtering mechanisms using a system of motorized slats on the outside and a roll-up curtain on the inside to ensure thermodynamic and phenomenological control of the space.

Beyond this transitional space unfolds the shared space, which in this case is a non-binary area allowing for flexible uses such as living, dining, and celebrating, either individually or collectively.
Behind a triple filtering system — comprising pivoting slatted panels, a translucent curtain, and a total blackout system — lie two alcove bedrooms, serving as individualized spaces for rest and personal pleasure.

The sequence of spaces and filters concludes with two meticulously designed hygiene areas, one made of white marble and the other of black marble, expressing two distinct ways of understanding life.