A house that breaks the mold: with three volumes and three patios, the air flows freely.

It's not a house for those who understand living as a succession of conventional spaces. Nor for those who seek comfort within predictable coordinates. It opens the door to new ways of living. The entrance is as if you were entering a small, enclosed world, like a village protected by a wall that runs almost around the entire perimeter of the site.

Within this envelope, the house unfolds into three pavilions and three courtyards, a deliberate fragmentation that proposes a life in transit, without hierarchies, without dominant axes. The house is almost a domestic landscape. The pavilions, made of light and warm materials, alternate with open spaces that are never residual: they are rooms as essential as any of the interior. There is an architecture of emptiness, of air, of light that passes through.

The three courtyards are spaces with their own unique character. The first is a Mediterranean plaza: we find a shade tree, a wisteria vine that climbs the structure, and a stone table for sharing meals, conversations, and long moments. The second courtyard evokes the Roman impluvium—a subtle but powerful reference to the proximity of Empúries. A pond with vegetation serves as a place to cool off and refreshes the atmosphere. The third is a herb garden, a productive and fragrant garden that rounds out the idea of a living house, in constant contact with nature.

The landscaping, the work of DA.CH, not only accompanies the architecture, but also explains and enriches it. So much so that the jury of the Girona Regions Architecture Awards awarded the house a mention and also distinguished it with the main prize for landscape strategy. The fit with the location, the interpretation of the climate and context, and the natural way in which the vegetation has been inserted make each courtyard a station on a changing, never-repeated journey.

Everything in Casa Tres Patis moves in an open way. The interiors, which could be independent but connect fluidly, allow for life to be staggered: perhaps there is an area for work, another for rest, another part enclosed within itself. There are no corridors, but there are paths, different ways of arriving and being. The materials accentuate this dichotomy between outside and inside. They act as a filter, a mediation between inside and outside, between fullness and emptiness. It not only protects from the sun or from prying eyes, but also contributes to the sense that everything is porous, in transit.

There are echoes of Antonio Bonet's Ricarda in the freewheeling approach to the house's conception; and echoes of the Case Study Houses in its experimental nature, in the break with the idea of the house as a container. For Twobo, dwelling can be freely broken down, fragmented, and recomposed. It's not a house to accommodate a pre-established life: it's a house that demands new ways of living. That's no small feat.

Like a small town

With the house divided into three pavilions and three courtyards as spaces for a life that transitions between the exterior and interior, this work by Twobo in Albons is like a small village where the inhabitants move freely and are always in contact with the nature they care for.