TEST Guillermo Santomà   Spain   From tapestry to wall. In essence, this was the Copernican turn Semper took with his principle of cladding, whereby structure gave up its protagonism in architecture in favor of Bekleidung: though humans learned to use durable materials, he held that

barea pizarro   Spain   Split programA young couple has pooled two separate professions in a single street-level establishment in Madrid’s Chamberí neighborhood, revamping the space to make it both a hair salon and a tattoo studio. Eager to avoid the usual associations with

SOLAR   Spain   Performing Pavilion is a revision of the home-workshop, proposing it as a new paradigm for the link between the work of art, the place where it is created, and contemporary lifestyles. Resulting from the enlargement of an existing unit, this space wh

Anna & Eugeni Bach Jaume Bach Bach arquitectes   Spain   The project involved renovating, refurbishing, and expanding the property at Passeig de Sant Joan 110 in Barcelona, in accordance with a new program of sixteen flats and two duplex units added on the roof. The original house was commissioned by Dolor

N O A R Q | José Carlos Nunes de Oliveira   Portugal   The project involved renovating a two-story house that had been abandoned for twenty years. The solid concrete construction showed many signs of having been vandalized. A surgery-like material and aesthetic reconstruction was performed by means of ap

NULA.STUDIO   Spain   The 60 square meters attic is completely stripped to accommodate a series of interconnected spaces that regulate their levels of intimacy through large dividing elements. Thus, a corridor that serves as both a bedroom and a study is divided by a slid

Adrià Escolano David Steegmann   Spain   Having to subdivide to accommodate two families, a residence in La Floresta has been transformed in a way that maintains the original arrangement but assigns different uses to the rooms…

Hanghar   Spain   A large flat was partitioned to form two separate but perfectly symmetrical residential units in which undifferentiated spaces are connected by a series of equidistant openings.

Studio Animal   Spain   In order to obtain a large, unobstructed main space, the more private rooms of an apartment in the Niño Jesús neighborhood are placed together in a compact block of chromatic contrasts…

Beatriz Alés Atelier   Spain   Originally intended for use by a large family, a dwelling in Tercio y Terol – an old neighborhood of private homes – has eliminated its partitions to form larger, more freely flowing spaces.

AMOO   Spain   The renovation of a flat tries to get the most out of a limited space by organizing it around an irregular core, in effect alleviating the rigidity of the apartment’s scheme of loadbearing walls…

Pachón–Paredes   Spain   The renovation of this flat with a 110-square-meter built area, in a building raised in the early 1970s in Madrid’s Pacifico neighborhood, is part of a series of projects falling under two ongoing investigations. ‘Non-Binary Space’ explores the syner

Lys Villalba Beatriz Arroyo   Spain   The second project of the Urban Cabinet series – which explores design strategies around the notion of ‘furniture-architecture’ or ‘furnitecture’ – involved renovating a 1950s open-block housing unit in central Madrid’s Retiro neighborhood. It unifie

barea pizarro   Spain   All at a minimumA small flat by the Manzanares River has been renovated to accommodate young members of a family that has occupied it since the building’s construction in the 1920s. It was partitioned into several rooms like a larger apartment, and t

Zaha Hadid Architects Ayesa arquitectura Italferr   Spain   The north terminal, inspired by the mountains in the backdrop of the station, is a geometric response to the vaulted system of the south terminal. In both cases, the double-height floors offer visual and spatial continuity with the exterior…

Gonzalo del Val Toni Gelabert   Spain   Gonzalo del Val and Toni Gelabert, in collaboration with Clara Castañeda, revamped this flat in Madrid’s Chamberí neighborhood, in a residential building raised between 1925 and 1927 for the Marquis of Amurrio by the architect Gustavo Fernández Balbu

TAKK Architecture   Spain   This thorough revamp of a 50-square-meter flat was carried out with a material budget of only 10,000 euros. Six decisions were made at the outset. The first one was to work with termal gradients in the functional and programmatic layout of the dwelli

Virseda-Vila Arquitectos Miguel Ángel Cámara Miguel Fernández Rueda   Spain   Located in downtown Logroño, this public secondary school was thoroughly revaped to create sports facilities, exhibition halls, an auditorium, and a multipurpose classroom that all citizens would have access to. The original building was characterize

Lys Villalba Beatriz Arroyo   Spain   Urban Cabinets is a series of home refurbishment projects that explores design strategies around the concept of furniture-architecture. In each project, the custom-made furnishings shape domesticity. Urban Cabinet Series (1): Domesticities around th

Studio.Noju   Spain   The thorough revamp of a 400-square-meter duplex on the 10th and11th floors of Torres Blancas in Madrid is presented as a dialogue with the apartment building that Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza built. Drawing from texts on the project that the archi

Martín Peláez   Spain   Ainhoa Martín and Francisco Peláez have carried out a full renovation for a home-cum-studio in a 1917 building located in the Madrid neighborhood of Palos de Moguer. Their Madrid-based practice, Martín Peláez, explains that the name of the project re

MAIO   Spain   This single-family house is emptied out to start with the interior reconstruction process, adapting the dwelling to current regulations and reinforcing the wall structure. The new central atrium leads to the different floors, all open to the garden a

MAIO   Spain   The refurbishment project proposes a landscaped roof based on a new topography. This garden is covered at specific areas in the tradition of orangeries and greenhouses, turning the vegetation into the key component of the design...

The house has traditionally been a promising ecosystem for young architects. Straight out of university, inexperienced and with not much to show for on their agendas, ‘newby’ professionals look for work wherever they can, and renovations of the homes

Miguel Fernández-Galiano   In schools of architecture, students are not taught how to execute renovations. This kind of work, disdained for years in schools and by the great representatives of contemporary architecture who teach there, has become the bread and butter of a prof