Cordoba 223 was built in 1953 and abandoned in 1986. Since its original design, it was conceived as a three-level residential building with 6 rowhouses and 6 apartments allocated in two different buildings.
This intervention presented great complexity as many different types of work had to be carried out. We had to build a new foundation as well as the main structural elements due to the most important earthquakes which affected the city (1985, 2017).
An abandoned building gained a new life, through 15 new apartments redistributed through the side patio and two retail shops at street level, this new configuration was the greatest challenge by increasing the livable area but preserving the essence of the original building, the strategy was adding 6 new volumes above the roofs of the original townhouses which connect to the two apartment buildings through bridges and corridors. The chosen material for the added boxes was burned wood on the outside in order to contrast with the original facades and preserving their hierarchy, also because of the lightness of the structure need it.
We believe that to intervine an old building has to be a completely different approach as to design a new one, partly because the final project has to enhance the old architecture and how it dialogues with the new, in this particular building we found the original venetian tile missing and broken in various areas, so instead of totally replacing or patching with some new tiles that would never blend, we chose to fill all the cracks and missing tiles with a golden paste as in kintsugi the japanese philosophy that stands for: “If an object has been damaged then it has more of a history and should therefore be celebrated and highlighted, rather than hidden or discarded.
Credits:
- FACTOR EFICIENCIA - CONSTRUCTOR - FERMIN ESPINOSA
- EDMUND SUMNER - PHOTOGRAPHER - EDMUND SUMNER
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