PRIEGO & LAGARES HOUSE (2004-2008)
Site. Roma, 22, Córdoba, Spain.
Client. Ignacio Martínez Lagares and Josefina Priego.
AWARDS  Félix Hernández Architectural Design 2008 (accesit), Architectural Association of Córdoba
This house deals with a very innovative design in the understanding of the different domestic cultures existing in the South of Spain in its encounter with some other contemporary preoccupations. The house is absolutely negating the exterior street, while profiting from a very rich interior relation with the yards and patios. Both relations are stylishly qualified by the use of different artifices and techniques. Priego+Lagares house is located in a quiet residential area at the foot of Sierra Morena, Cordoba . The house is built on a very elongated plot and, at the owner’s request, the front is intentionally concealed from view from the approach street .The main façade, therefore, appears as a great blind curved wall which will wrap the visitor in a two story body, but which will conceal the true identity of the house. Entering into the house becomes a ritual. The entrance cannot be seen from the exterior, one has to turn around several times to find it, while first discovering the different spaces of the building. Once having passed the façade wall that radically separates the public from the private, the relationship between interior and exterior begins to be blurred. The design of garden and building are tied together.The ground floor slightly floats on the ground with big windows that insert fragments of plants from the garden into the house. The presence of the house in the garden is always crosswise. There is not even a proper back to the house, as it is ambiguous, like a cut.The boundaries become slippery. The difference between inside and outside disappears in the interior of the living room. The design unites the wrecked geometry of the glass wall with the reflections and speculations it produces to enhance the virtual confusion between indoor and outdoor. In the two-story body, a skylight lets the night come through the substructure that fixes the metallic panelling, providing the sensation of the back of a cinema screen. This space is designed to store objects (souvenirs), like an uncompleted shelf whose cavities would let the light through.The visual link with Sierra Morena is a way of approaching the landscape, of searching for physical continuity through closeness, so that it stops being something far and melancholic, that we will never be able to touch or embrace.

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