Alventosa Morell Arquitectes received a brief from their client’s in Barcelona, Spain to build an inexpensive energy efficient Home in a very short time frame. To accommodate the time frame the architects went with a prefabricated design that would not need any additional finishing once installed on the site. They also created a design that would be flexible to the topography of the site thereby reducing the amount of prep work required.
Choosing wood as the finishing material both inside and out with the exception of the concrete floors made the coordination of the construction crews simpler and quicker while also reducing the overall building costs.
The 6 modules are placed to adapt as much as possible to the solar availability of the site and the existing locations of the trees. This created a final design that has an intense relationship between Casa GG and the Montseny landscape around it. In order for this to be successful, an exact bioclimatic study was performed.
Casa GG was also built with natural and recycled materials from the locale to reduce the ecological impact and the structure was designed with as much thermal resistance as possible with the given budget and time frame.
The front of the home is comprised of 3 boxes, two bedrooms and the living room with the entrance located between the larger living room box and a bedroom box. A full height window separates the two bedroom boxes.
There are several glass doors that connect the interior zones to the outdoors, pictured here is a door leading from the living room to an outdoor dining zone.
A third door is located behind the 2nd of the two bedrooms and in front of the master bedroom.
A large common area connecting the master bedroom and the other two bedrooms has been outfitted as an office with the desk in front of a window overlooking the backyard. A door leads off of this common area to the home’s bathroom and a hallway connects the private zones with the kitchen, dining and living room areas.
While the office area consists of no storage and only a long slab of solid wood connecting the walls of the master bedroom and the washroom, the hallway has been custom designed with rows of cube shaped storage shelves that hold all the client’s paperwork.
The hallway opens up to the dining room which has a wall fitted with the same square storage cubbies as the hall and next to it is the fourth of the glass doors connecting the Cassa GG to the gardens that surround it.
Cassa GG uses 75.77% less energy then a similar home built in a traditional manner through such methods as solar light collection in the winter. This means that the architects where successfully able to create a low cost energy efficient Passive House that just happens to be creative and beautiful as well. Awesome.
Alventosa Morell Arquitectes
Photography by Adria Goula
