Casa de la Riera

A long refurbishment carried out in phases, because the family kept living in the house.

Each phase ended with one wall fewer and one window more.

Materials have a memory. Wood darkens where the hand rests every day, metal turns more matt over the years, and glass keeps, in a way you can barely see, the way it has been cleaned. A project that takes this into account does not try to stop wear, but lets it in as one more collaborator. The result is never exactly what was drawn, and that difference, looked at properly, tends to be the most alive part of the work.

There is a way of working that consists in starting from the end: imagining the house or the shop already lived in, with its things out of place and its lights on at odd hours, and only then asking what it needed. Often the answer is far less than had been planned. The people who live or work there occupy the space all at once and with an energy no plan can anticipate; the best you can do is leave them room, and a certain margin for getting things wrong.