A house to finish

A few days ago, a well-known influencer in architecture made public on social media an extravagant proposal from a Catalan architecture firm with the healthy intention of generating debate.

The project consisted of the interior renovation of a home where, after the demolition of the original layout, the intervention seemed to focus solely on placing some habitable furniture, raised from the floor by means of legs, leaving the rest as is.

At first glance, the image reminded me of the famous Renaissance painting by Antonello da Messina Saint Jerome in his Study, from 1474, in which the saint appears reading barefoot on a kind of wooden canopy inside a cathedral.

The scene has been used on countless occasions in architecture schools to explain the need to create welcoming places, tailored to the human being, even within other larger spaces. The French writer Georges Perec explained precisely this same picture in an exquisite way in his book Species of Spaces five hundred years later, in 1974, recreating himself in the details that highlighted the domesticity that the furniture managed to grant to that inhospitable place.

However, the debate that the housing reform generated in the media was not so much about this. The ability or not of these objects to make the space habitable was not discussed, but rather the radicality of having left the rest of the house with the appearance of a ruin.

Both the question that was posed and the comments of the spectators went in this direction: what do you think of leaving the materials as they are? Do you like this unfinished aesthetic?

The construction of the furniture itself seemed to contribute to this calculatedly neglected image of the rest of the house, leaving the insulating filling materials (sheep’s wool) exposed, which makes us wonder, not only about the durability of these surfaces, but even about their dubious hygiene in a domestic space.

We should not confuse leaving a house unfinished with not completely finishing the house

Returning to the painting of Saint Jerome, what motivates the need to create a cozy subspace through a piece of furniture is the disproportionate size of the church in relation to the human scale, something that clearly does not happen in the house to be renovated, since this one already has an appropriate proportion and scale. Furthermore, in churches the floor is usually cold, and the raised wooden canopy precisely allows Saint Jerome to take off his shoes to read comfortably. The authors of the reform use the argument of the “box inside another box” (now popularized as box in box) to explain better climate behavior. But this is not true: a 50 square meter apartment in a block of flats is already a box inside another box. There are architectural interventions that have explored the box in box strategy more successfully.

In the conversion of industrial spaces, for example, where the space that needs to be air-conditioned is enormous in relation to the space to be inhabited, it may make sense to build an internal climate box and leave the rest of the volume temperate, without energy expenditure. This is the case of the reform of the Galenicum offices in Esplugues de Llobregat, by H arquitectes, where, in addition, the “leftover” spaces, due to their size, have the capacity to house an alternative program complementary to that of the work spaces that do not have as much thermal requirement: meeting rooms, rest areas, etc.

There are other projects where the economic investment in climatic comfort takes precedence over the investment in coverings or finishes. This is the case, for example, of the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, where architects Jean Philippe Vassal and Anne Lacaton rehabilitated an old interwar building as a museum for the creation of contemporary art.

The authors remodeled the building, reinforced the structure, protected it against fire and installed an efficient climate system. A careful reading of the project allows us to appreciate that they did not spend money on interior finishes because the use allowed it and the need to redistribute the building discouraged it. The unfinished aesthetic, in this case, is based on the prioritization of thermal comfort and the use of the building as a container and exhibitor, where the protagonist is the cultural activity or the art object rather than the space itself.

However, we should not confuse leaving a house unfinished with not completely finishing the house. An unfinished house, in fact, is a very practical thing, as most of our homes are: a set of rooms and spaces that change as our needs change. An unfinished house allows us to grow at times in our lives when we require more space or to decrease when we no longer need it so much.

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit the house of Bruno Sauer, director architect of the GBCe, and his wife Paula. Located on the edge of the Valencian vegetable garden, in Rocafort, they explained to us that, in reality, their house is the story of the growth of the garden that surrounds it. A domesticated nature that in certain places germinates and offers spaces in the shade, where the house opens up and colonizes the garden, and in others where it degenerates and withers waiting for its moment to bloom. They showed us, excitedly, fallow areas where they want to transplant some species in the hope that the vines will generate new places for fireflies with views of the vegetable garden. And they treated us to a delicious, freshly harvested dinner, in their cozy house, always to finish.