A house in the middle of the city. A house for a family of 5 or 6 members, with quite an amount of program. A "house" in an area of urban density and on a plot that, despite being quite wide and long, is inevitably surrounded by other buildings and with all the pressure of a big city. Of the existing building, only the street facade will remain, which is a protected facade. The regulations allow the construction of a ground floor and two floors, with a considerable depth that perfectly meets the needs of the client's program, but at the same time this very deep condition suggests that it could be a house with an interior area that is too dark and bad ventilated.

The project begins with the challenge of qualifying the centre, prioritizing it and turning it into the best place in the house. It is a wide plot that allows the possibility of recovering traditional typologies of interior patio or atrium, where the centre of the house becomes the best space in the house, the most representative and the one that indirectly qualifies the rest of the spaces that surround it. 

Converting the centre into a space much more connected with the outside, full of light and with the possibility of opening up and ventilating the whole house. A space in between that - although programmed and deeply architectural - lets in the natural intensity of the climate from the roof and divides the house in half, emptying it, making it more spacious and letting it breathe. A space that, due to its less domestic conditions of height, light and ventilation, manages to convey a feeling of being outside. The verticality of the central space and the zenith opening organize air and light. They make the invisible visible by sliding natural light to the bottom of the atrium while stimulating the speed of ventilation and the exit of hot air upwards to the exterior. 

The program that is organized around the central space is extensive and quite fragmented. We propose a second categorization of the program that hierarchizes it so that each floor has four important spaces that are larger and higher, and these are complemented by secondary spaces that are smaller and clearly of less height. The hierarchy between rooms is used to absorb the strong irregularity of the plot and solve all the spaces in a regular and orthogonal way in the main pieces. As in an excavated architecture, the different directionality of the spaces is absorbed by the thickness of the walls.