#house#1,130 house of the year at the Wan Awards/ Eric Vökel

When one of your projects receives awards as prestigious as Best Architectural Project from the Official School of Architects of Madrid (COAM for its Spanish acronym) in 2014 and the “House of the Year” at the WAN Awards, organized by the British magazine World Architecture News, among many others, you discover why you chose a professional path which entails as much effort and wear as architecture.

Estudio.entresitio represents a milestone in the careers of three architects who have gone down in history for each of their works: María Hurtado de Mendoza Wahrolén, César Jiménez de Tejada Benavides and José María Hurtado de Mendoza Wahrolén. Alvar Ruiz Villanueva is a regular collaborator of the studio.

In 2014 they finished the single family home baptized as #house#1,130, built on the outskirts of Madrid; an authentic achievement of extravagant discretion distributed over two floors 500 square meters in size. It is a structural jewel which glides over the sloping ground thanks to the work and mastery of the estudio.entresitio architects. Among so many particularities lies an essential objective: a request from the owners for anonymity and practical invisibility. And that’s how the house was designed; the architects were able to prevent the true dimensions of the house from being determined from the outside, owing to a façade which plays with density diversity, forming an extremely abstract unit.

Thanks to the infinite panels of articulated aluminum an incredible combination of light and shadow is created in the interior spaces. The two floors display different superimposed levels: on the top floor we find the daytime area, including the living room, dining room and kitchen. On the bottom floor we discover the four bedrooms distributed in cubicles located along a hallway.

Its name, #house#1,130, is an authentic homage to the measuring system created by Le Corbusier who, in 1948, published his book titled “Le Modulor”, in which he presents and publicizes his work and joins the tradition of searching for a mathematical relationship between the measurements of man and nature, just like Leonardo Da Vinci and León Batista Alberti, among others, did before him. According to “Le Modulor”, the height of the belly button is exactly 1,130 millimeters from ground level.

Photographer Rolan Halbe immortalizes this amazing project with the skill which characterizes him. His work has been internationally displayed in collective exhibitions at important galleries in Germany and Spain. The principal specialized magazines have assiduously published his work, thanks to the artist’s particular architectural vision. His clients include Morphosis Architects, Zaha Hadid, Richard Meier, Jean Nouvel, Odile Decq, Santiago Calatrava and Coop Himmelblau.