Creating a Creative Haven: Live and Work with Connections to Conde Duque Cultural Centre
The Home Urban Home project involves building a wooden mini-home in which the inhabitants can sleep, eat, work and rest. The space is full of light and nature and offers excellent views to the outside. It is the work of architecture firm MYCC, who presented this installation made from sustainable poplar panels at the Madrid Design Festival.
The house combines materials as diverse as polycarbonate and Garnica's Efficiency Poplar panels - a 100% European high-quality poplar plywood that is incredibly lightweight, stable and easy to machine, making it extremely versatile for use in this kind of construction project.
The volumetric shape of the installation resembles what a child would draw to represent a house and takes inhabitants back to their youth by making them feel right at home, even though it is a temporary workspace for its users. In the words of its creators, "the interior spaces overlap one another and can accommodate a multitude of creative activities in which the user decides and the architecture imposes nothing."
The concept behind this project is based on recreating a house within a house. The ground floor has been designed keeping in mind that it will be the busiest space. The kitchen is conceived as a large, bright meeting space - enhanced by the light tones of the poplar wood - that is spacious and transparent in contrast to the separate relaxation and rest area, which is opaque and warm. The tree, which grows up through some of the rooms, underlines the importance of combining architecture with nature to create more sustainable habitats.
In this regard, poplar is one of the most sustainable species and its wood is becoming increasingly popular as a replacement for other species and materials. Garnica's poplar plywood comes from certified sustainable plantations where one hectare can absorb up to 11 tonnes of CO2 per year.
This house is on display at the Centro Cultural Conde Duque de Madrid and the final site for this piece will be the first floor of the same building.
