Urban Shelter

Madrid, Spain – MYCC

Built area: 21.0 sqm
Year built: 2012
Photography: Elena Almagro

From the architect. This singular urban shelter is just twenty square meters and nevertheless is one hundred cubic meters of volume. In such an enclosed space should a single person live and work. He will use his creativity and dynamism to make it his own sweet home.

A longitudinal section defines the project. The space highness has been used to accommodate several pieces, which are limited in volume but at the same time all are visually connected to each other. Even the bathroom is within sight… The necessity to hold the programmed uses, each of them with specific characteristics and size, leads to an image which looks like those old computers platform games. The idea of light and simple floors where could be possible even easily jump from one to another was always in mind from the very first sketches.

Size, both horizontal and vertical, of every piece gives as a result a non lineal path. So, moving from one room to another is a kind of small physical effort. Going up to the kitchen or getting down to the bedroom offers a stressed change and different sensation of the space, both any different unit and the apartment as a whole.

The apartment, even with its small size, wants to offer generous spaces and a big quantity of different pieces of use. The pieces that make it up, does not really have a fixed clearly defined use: the kitchen is a walk-through room to get the living. There are stands rather than stairs to go down the living, which is over a cellar-storage room. Then, it is possible to get the ladder to go up to the indoor sunny terrace, a place to be used as a study or a chillout. Also the central living room connects through four steps to the bathroom. This is an oversized kind of luxury room that holds even an in situ cosy kind of hamman bath. Construction and finishing are made in a direct and unadorned way and all is full of bright white.

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You’ll find a link to a video below the image gallery.

With the ever-present challenge of affordability, do you see a future for housing such as this? Share your thoughts…