Gallery and Hotel, Rehabilitation and New Construction, Havana, 2016.

 

 

The commission took place in one of the first houses of the Vedado neighborhood in La Habana, that dates from 1888 and carries the 1st degree of Protection of Monuments.

 

 

Almost untouched since its creation, it contained 1600 m2 on its property and 600 m2 distributed in the house and garage.

 

 

We decided inside the house just to change the roof for a concrete one and not do anything else.

 

 

However, it needed an additional 200m of program that seemed impossible to place in a house that seems to be perfectly complete.

 

The strategy of intervention in the landscape, instead of producing architectural objects, uses and amplifies what existed before the architecture.

 

 

Thus we redefined the boundaries of the lot by reshaping the courtyard through a building that would perform as a new background wall.

 

 

We divided the program into 3 parts, 2 public ones (the exhibition spaces, the library, the offices, the bathrooms and the restaurant) while in the new hidden volume we placed the warehouses and technical areas and 3 study rooms for a residential program.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Fernando Martirena, Anadis Gonzalez, David Medina and Gerardo Guillén.