Cien House

The number of steps on a hill path nearby, or the height of an old cypress -that reminds one of those described by Walter Pater- or even the height above sea level in round figures where the podium sits, would serve as decisive coincidences when it came to explaining the shape of the Cien House.

But the factors that shape a house are always the same. Unifying two floor plans -an extended one and a concentrated one- we repeated the same unit twelve times: a square figure asymmetrically divided into four rooms.

But the factors that shape a house are always the same. Unifying two floor plans -an extended one and a concentrated one- we repeated the same unit twelve times: a square figure asymmetrically divided into four rooms.

Trapped between these two factual worlds, domestic life is protected; a large room for day use and a couple of bedrooms piled on it for the night. The main room steps down towards the west. By setting the lintels at a single defined height, the progressive sequence of frames makes the perception of its depth relative.

Entering the main room is equivalent to diving under the platform whose height is defined by the whole number 100 (the name of the house, Cien, means a hundred in Spanish). You reach the studio by facing a mirror that shows in the inside what lies across the street. Entering the tower is a kind of blindness. Here, the cypress cut and turned into steps locks into a continuous spiral that slowly offers the sight back while ascending.

The construction is a regular and monolithic layering of concrete with exposed aggregate. Inside, the walls are covered in painted wood, almost without thickness and barely interrupted by the galvanized steel frames that hold the windows in place.