Mayo House. Memory
“My house is diaphanous, but not of glass. It is more of nature itself than of vapour. Its walls condense and relax as I wish. Sometimes, I narrow them in around myself, like a protective armour... But at other times, I let the walls of my house expand out into their own space, which is infinite extensibility. Geometry is transcended.” George Spyridaki
The building sits on a completely flat piece of land, which are the image and continuity of the Moraña lands of the Castilian plains which surround it.
The fact that the architecture belongs to the place itself, makes the place condition itself and makes it special. In this case we are before a landscape which modifies itself in time, with the passing of the seasons, with the variation in climate, in short, with the rhythm the crops mark …
In August, the bulky bales of straw start to populate the flat pieces of ground around the town, the places known as the threshing floors.
Remarkable forms arise, round, in the same way as the continuous presence of the line of the horizon is round. In the face of these facts, the house takes on a formal configuration like a set of volumes frozen in time seated one upon another. This depicts the fact that it is not a full-time home by giving expression to the immediateness of the gesture of that gathering in of the harvest.
Of the total 24 hours:
18 hours correspond to the day, accompanying the daytime living areas where the spaces wrapped in glass grow.
6 hours correspond to the night, the bedrooms are like little cells where the hollows get smaller and smaller and play around until they reach the right size in these spaces.
The house is at the same time cell and world, a centre for retreat and, at the same time, a place which opens up to the world. The windows, which in certain locations occupy the space destined for walls, communicate the transparent microcosm of the interior space with the spaciousness of the landscape and of the sky, and the eyes meet no resistance. The space seems to unite itself with the universe, although it is closed over and rests upon itself.
A house formed by little clots of reality which impose upon time the experience of the events of a single day.
A garden wall will mark the limit between the plot of land and the plain, taming the setting immediately around the house, creating a potential oasis, a place with shade, a cloister. However, there will always be duality: from the upper storey the Castilian horizon can be sought out, trapping it, as if it were one of Benjamín Palencia´s canvases
The clear prismatic configuration is reflected both in the layout of the house, which marks out three bands on the ground floor, with the upper floor placed crossways upon them, and also in the outside planning, with three perfectly marked out areas, the driveway, the green garden and the gravel garden.
The house is laid out for different uses, from the ground floor, which has the main hallway with the stairway leading to the studio on the upper floor, the living room opening onto the green patio, the kitchen linked into the living room, the service corridor and the dining room and the area of bedrooms, bathrooms and toilets turned towards their inner world and connected at specific points to the gravel garden.
The empty and full spaces impregnate in a seriation the whole volumetry of the house, varying from the widest spaces in the daytime areas to the minuscule and playful hollows of the night-time areas.
The materiality of these ideas has been achieved by setting together load-bearing rendered walls typical of the zone with surfaces of glass, using natural anodized aluminium and wood as the uniting threads.