Prefabricated home set up in seven days

Garcia, an architect, calls it his “madman’s urge to find out” if something can be done. That’s how he explains the urge that drove him to design a house made from pieces of prefabricated infrastructure. The concrete components are affordable, “structurally efficient” and can be assembled quickly, Garcia said. So quickly, in fact, that the major construction on the two-storey house he shares with Debora Mesa, 29, an architect at his Madrid firm, Ensamble Studio, was completed in just seven days, in the summer of 2008.

Using a crane, Garcia’s team assembled the oversize pieces – three giant concrete I-beams originally intended to be part of a bridge, two concrete segments of an irrigation canal and two steel girders – all of which were anchored by a 20-ton granite slab. Once the prefabricated parts were set in place, the structure was enclosed using 35 thick, rectangular pieces of glass. Interior walls, of which there are few, were built using plasterboard. The remaining work, mostly wiring and plumbing, was finished a few weeks later.

More time on design

The design work, however, took nearly two years to complete. Part of the difficulty was making sure the massive prefabricated parts could be adequately balanced, a painstaking process that involved multiple trials using scaled-down pieces, Garcia said.The 2,190-square-foot home was built for about 250,000 euros (about $350,000) on a lot Garcia bought a decade ago in a gated community here, about 20 miles from Madrid. It has two swimming pools: one in the patio area on the ground floor and the other in a length of irrigation canal cantilevered dramatically from the second floor. Most of the walls are glass, so there is ample natural light, and the couple decided not to install overhead fixtures. There are floor lamps, but only a few. Still, as Mesa noted: “What we save in electricity, we are paying in window cleaner.”

Start of a new life

On one side of the L-shaped ground floor are two living areas; on the other are the kitchen, laundry room and pantry. On the second floor are the master bedroom, where Alejandro, the couple’s one-year-old son, sleeps with his parents; the other bedroom belongs to Anton, Garcia’s eight-year-old son from a previous marriage, who often stays with them and loves swimming in the irrigation canal, which he calls “the flying pool.”
The house, Garcia said, represents the culmination of a process that began seven years ago, when he and Mesa “were thinking about how to start our new life.” And it has been “the origin of so many things,” he added. Not just family life, but new work as well: so far, it has drawn the attention of a number of people, including several new clients who are interested in building with concrete infrastructure parts.

The Berklee College of Music has selected Garcia’s firm to design a 24-story building in Valencia, Spain, and he was recently commissioned to design an opera house in Zaragoza.There have even been requests to build a replica of the house, but Garcia and Mesa have turned them down, a decision they are now reconsidering. Initially, they said, it seemed strange to think of other people living in their home – a house that was a personal experiment. But if artists like Andy Warhol could create multiple originals from one prototype, Garcia said, surely architects can do the same.“Why not?” he said. Each house will be on a different site, so “it will always be different.”