Albania House in Ciudad Real by OOIIO Architecture

It is a rather unique housing project, which despite the very simple and economical materials used in its construction, achieves great expressiveness thanks to its volumetric and conceptual games.

Architect: OOIIO Architecture
Location: Ciudad Real, Spain
Year: 2018
Area: 250.30 sq.m.
Team: Joaquin Millan Villamuelas, Natalia Garmendia Cobo, Irene Muñoz Fernández, Alessio Runci, Pilar Bolaños Almeida, Paolo Mercorillo, Mario Gómez de Aguero.
Structures: Consultora CPE, Juan Vallejo.
Interior Design: OOIIO Architecture.
Facilities: Agroser Ingenieros.
Civil Engineer: Antonio Ruiz Rodríguez.
Safety Manager: Antonio Ruiz Rodríguez.
Builder: Propacons Mora s.l.
Photography: Josefotoinmo

From the architect: How to deal with the design of a house starting from a blank paper? How to organize and shape something as personal and important for a family as their own home? How to make singular and special something so many times repeated as a single-family housing project?

The OOIIO Architecture team is specialized over the years in the design and construction of unique homes, investigating different creative techniques to find originality, surprise and awaken new sensations in the projects they carry out.

Applying the “paranoiac-critical” method used by Dali and other Surrealist artists, the OOIIO Architects Team look for references, links, in the world of dreams, of the imagination, which they then shape and turn into reality through technique and constructive logic.

This is how that house design process started: after understanding the needs of the clients, site and regulations, the imagination was let fly in search of some poetic link that formed part of their lives and that they identified as something close and suggestive.

Thus we arrive at the famous La Mancha Mills, a traditional massive constructions, which emerge strikingly in the landscape of this area as cylindrical, white and coarse volumes that play with the sunlight and the wind. Its simple shape and architecture is a combination of the vertical lines of the white cylinder with the diagonals of its characteristics blades and inclined roof.

Albania House wants to be an abstraction of all this. As Dali saw human faces on the rocks of the coast of his hometown Cadaques, OOIIO Architects wanted to suggest windmills in a contemporary single-family house. A house that resembles a mill, decomposed and recomposed again, completing a different figure. A game, an experiment, an application of artistic techniques in architecture to create a unique work, nothing standardized.

The rational part of the entire creative process was focused on solving the needs of customers always following principles of sustainability and efficiency, fitting everything into a tight budget with simple materials and quick construction techniques. The program is distributed in three volumes: towards the west with a triangular floor, the living room; in the east with a square floor, kitchen and bedrooms; between both pieces we created an entrance hall similar to those “zagüanes”, welcome rooms coming also directly extracted from the local vernacular architecture.

The plot is located on the outskirts of the city, in a quiet residential area just where the countryside meets the urban, in a place of La Mancha, Ciudad Real.

The most observant and dreamer walkers who find the house there will discover a new link to the imagination, a link to another local cultural reference, the facades of the house look like the faces of giants who look at us directly defiant behind the wall of the house.

So? ... Are they mills, or giants?

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