Flying across the Madrilenian mountains, we chose a hill to land on. Its slope enabled us to establish a visual relationship with the surroundings, gazing Colmenar Viejo, the mountains and Madrid’s metropolitan area in the horizon.
The local topographic and geologic conditions are preserved and used as the main leit-motivs of the intervention. Its rocky, naturally-pitched substratum suggested hovering on top of it instead of altering its original features.
Thus, we unrolled our flying carpet over the topography leaning towards El Espino stream, softly evening its surface and generating a new inhabitable territory. Our carpet is made up of identical units which rest upon one another and, punctually, upon the slope, reproducing the topographic geometry of the hill below. The project consists of 67 dwelling units which are grouped into a perforated cloud, which can be accessed through the space below it. This volume is arranged as a 6-row array of dwellings, in which the number of units featured in each row varies from 9 to 12. The cloud lands on the rock below, partly artificial –parking lot and lumber rooms- and partly natural –the original hill-. Therefore, the array of dwellings becomes stepped in order to adapt to the slope, pitched 30%.
The units are held in the air by one another, and superimposed over the hill, facing west. The users’ parking slots are placed at the same level as the access to their dwellings, whereas the free, common areas are scattered all over the plot. Thus, the units are structured downwards, where the main open spaces are distributed along circular terraces set at different levels.
Each dwelling is organized in two areas; the first one is an open, extrovert and equipped space, directly communicated with a generous, exterior terrace. This open space can achieve a high degree of intimacy by means of a security lattice shutter. The second area, a working, studying and resting space, is related to a private courtyard. The intervention is carried out by means of pre-fab, load-bearing concrete pannels and pre-fab slabs, which enable a substantial reduction of the building costs, as well as of the construction period estimated by the developer in the competition phase.
