Location: Seville
Status: Accomplished
Year: 2023
Developer: Private
Colaborators : Lola Viega, Daniel Leiva, Javier Serrano
Photo: Baum Lab
Synapse House is an experimental housing project that advocates for open domestic interactions. Its star-shaped floor plan organizes domestic uses around two interconnected halls, illuminated from skylights. Like in neuronal network, several branches spread out from the nucleus towards the exterior. Every space is, thus, intimately connected with the garden, in some sort of architectural synapse. Two L-shaped, timber-made, bodies provide the interior with bathrooms, closets and kitchen, as they articulate the domestic fluxes around the skylighted halls.
Built with an insulated double concrete shell, the building optimizes the use of materials and their bioclimatic performance.
In response to the classical question: How much does you building weigh? the answer would be that it weighs less than a half of what would be expected, with three times more thermal insulation. The material implications of this are very significant, as it reduces also the foundations and the digging level.
General description
The assignment was to design a sustainable, four-room, house, with the minimum carbon footprint, for a couple with three children. The project aims at redefining the housing typologies usually developed in these residential areas. Maximizing the filtering surfaces, considering the implications of orientation or softening interior-exterior permeabilities were some of the main ideas for the project. The way in which the building is posed on site enables unexpected transitions between indoor and outdoor areas, private and public or social and intimate.
A promenade through a dry garden leads the resident towards an entrance porch. As an open threshold, this exterior, roofed, space connects the entrance garden with a more private back garden, where the swimming pool is located.
Once inside, two skylighted halls articulate the uses, being the more public ones located facing South to the main garden. All the domestic spaces gravitate around the double hall core. Two independent rooms, one of them en-suite, and a big space thought to be split in two in the future emerge from the secondary hall.
The social areas: kitchen, living room and dining, radiate from the main hall, in a V-shaped layout that enables divergent views towards the garden.
Concept / Context strategy
This house redefines the typological conception of domesticity as an ecological sequence of increasing privacies. From its main North-South axis, the building spreads in several directions towards the garden, launching complex interactions with the outdoor spaces. Like in a neural network, a series or branches grow from the nucleus, in a star-shaped pattern, in order to establish synapses between exterior and interior, landscape and architecture or intimate and social. In the areas in which these new axes intersect, the distribution spaces appear, enhanced by the natural light pouring in from the skylights above. The roof is a flat steep surface that intersects the star-shaped outline of the façades. The skylights are produced by a very simple geometrical operation, by folding the slab to enable upper windows.
Solved in a single storey body, the section increases its height as uses become more social. A slightly tilted, flat, roof sections the extrusion of the complex floor plan perimeter. The volume then subtly evolves, along the main axis, towards the south porch, where the main living spaces face the garden.
Conceived as a prototype, this house assumes the change of paradigm that construction technique is already facing. Semi prefabricated elements are assembled in an open system, able to formalize any geometrical solution, with a great climatic performance and the minimum use of material resources.
Construction/ Material and structure
This building is made of just three primary materials: wood (storage elements, window frames), concrete (structural shell, flooring) and glass. The semi-prefabricated shell system consists of a twelve-centimetre-thick insulating core, an electro welded, galvanised, steel mesh on each side (linked by transversal connectors) and a four-centimetres-thick concrete sheet on each face, moulded and poured on site. Thus, we obtain an acoustically and thermally insulated structural envelope, with a raw concrete finish on both sides, in less than 20 centimetres thick.
The prefabricated insulation boards are located in place like a 1:1 cardboard model, before the concrete is applied. The patented system BauPanelTM was originally thought to be built with pumped concrete, which could then be finished manually as a flat surface. Nevertheless, we adapted it to be used with plywood moulds and poured concrete, which implied the use of very liquid micro-concrete. There are very few examples of this technique, with none featuring a nerveless façade.
The flooring system consists of a polished ten-centimetre-thick layer of solid concrete, embedding a radiant system that provides both heating and cooling.
The house is designed to be a zero-carbon building, thought to be eventually unplugged from any external supply. It combines passive sustainable strategies, such as thick continuous insulation, absence of thermal bridges, sun protection for south-facing windows, cross ventilation with chimney effect through the skylight, natural indirect light in very space or thermal inertia control; with active strategies, like photovoltaic and solar thermal panels (integrated in the south wall), efficient heat-pump-based hot water, central heating and cooling and LED lighting.
