Lucas House

At Casa Lucas we reflect on the coherence between structure, space, proportion and their resonances. A reflection that once again aims for a confluence of interests, inherent to the practice of Studio Wet, and which the Borrero house probably exemplified most clearly.

And it is not because these themes have already been dealt with that they cease to be objects of inspiration, in a dynamic that still seems inexhaustible to us. This small scale feeds our creative agenda, and forces us without excuses to intensify the proposal to compensate for everything else.

The Borrero house was pure muscle, load-bearing brick walls that inseparably resolved the envelope and the structure of the building. Initially we sought that coherence in this Casa Lucas in Almensilla, where once again we have to manage the encounter between the new and the old. However, in a course of accelerated maturity, it now seems to us that that strict coherence is surpassed, and that perhaps our creative agenda, gaining in autonomy, has changed course somewhat. And in this extension of a house with traditional load-bearing walls (with a beautiful brick facade), the longitudinal section of the extension already shows us certain contradictions, between the massive and the light, between brick and steel, as it is formed by a mixed structure of metal supports and brick factory supports. On all of them rests a simple reinforced concrete slab. In our extension project, the sizes of the supports are diverse, from the oversized pilaster on the ground and first floors to the metal pillar that receives the loads in the centre of the slab. And here the repetition of the structural elements is reduced to their simple idealisation, and their tectonic character ceases to be coherent with a noticeable difference in magnitude in the loads.

All these elements become autonomous and independent, and in some way force the rest of the construction to be so as well. In this way, two large beams of exposed concrete protrude from the slab and build a façade that is almost didactic, where the seams of the building are shown: the self-protected sheet of the roof becomes a façade and the gaps are nothing more than what remains of closing where privacy is needed.

Proportions, sections and sizes in conflict, diverse, that generate enough tension to raise a certain uneasiness. But happy doubts, since in the end they feed an unexpected result.