Empty the house so it lives again

Can Biel is a house that is part of the life of the town, literally. From its balcony on the Plaça Major of Mieres, in that valley that Josep Pla defined as the “casserole” of the Garrotxa, the town festival proclamation is still announced. But, behind the facade and regardless of its historical function, the interior of Can Biel is today very different from what it had been for a good part of its history. Architects Pau Sarquella and Carmen Torres, founders of the Sarquella Torres studio in Banyoles, have converted that house, which had been uninhabited for decades, into an open, flexible, and transformable domestic space.

The dwelling has an elemental geometry: three square floors of eight by eight meters, 64 square meters each, fitted within thick stone walls. Over time, the interiors had deteriorated; they wanted spaciousness and knew that not everything that exists needs to be preserved, and not everything that is preserved must condition the future. Therefore, the first major gesture was to empty. Deteriorated elements were removed and the interior of the three floors was freed to recover its spatial capacity. The central pillar, now made of concrete and with a smaller section than the original, maintains the house's structural logic, while the staircase was moved to one of the corners. The center remained freer and the floors began to relate to each other, visually and also through light and ventilation.

On the ground floor, this freedom is perceived in a special way. The different floor levels, rather than separating, create a succession of areas. Living room, kitchen and dining room occupy a single space at different heights; the layout does not depend on walls. Between the living room and the kitchen, for example, the partition reaches neither the ceiling nor the side walls. In a sense, the boundaries exist but do not enclose. It is a way of making the house spacious today and allowing it to be different tomorrow.

The first floor houses the bedrooms. Here too, the furniture—a succession of wardrobes—distributes the sparsely partitioned space and creates intimacy. The top floor, on the other hand, is a large room available for whatever is needed: a play area, study, or guest room. The lack of definition is not a shortcoming, but an important reserve for the future.

The same idea appears in the materials. The new first-floor slab is made of concrete, with beams and vaults, a more robust solution that contributes to giving rigidity to the whole and to stitching the new elements with the stone walls. Above, wood takes over with a lighter framework that recovers, in a way, the materiality of the old ceilings. The house thus combines two ways of building that also express two ways of understanding the house's past: reinforcing what needs solidity and lightening what can continue to be more flexible.

The stairs also explain this duality. The one on the ground floor is solid and takes advantage of its volume to incorporate a small bathroom and storage spaces. The one that goes up to the second floor is made of wood, much lighter, suspended from the slab. Below it is the library.

None of these decisions regarding emptying, keeping the floors open and the spaces connected, would make as much sense if the house had closed back in on itself. Hence, the relationship with the square was also kept alive. The entrance door, divided in two, becomes a window, and the translucent glass allows light and the presence of the exterior to reach the interior without eliminating its privacy.

The Sarquella Torres project does not intend to recover a hypothetical original image of the house. The stone that has resisted, the new concrete, the wood, and the whitewash coexist like the different stages of a history that has not yet ended. Nor is the layout fixed in any way definitively. Today, the furniture can define a space that could change in the future to give it another use.

In any case, after decades empty, Can Biel is once again a home. It is not so much about having rebuilt what was there as it is about having recovered the possibility of things happening there. That spaces change, that furniture moves or transforms, that other needs arrive and, if the case arises, other inhabitants. A house, after all, is not only what the walls are capable of preserving, but also everything they may still come to welcome.

Dynamic squares

A square, in principle, is a static shape, but in the case of Can Biel, the architects from the Sarquella Torres studio have turned the three 8 x 8 metre floors into three dynamic, open, transformable spaces.