Platinum Winner of the Architecture & Design Collection Awards 2023

Tornado House

Architecture
Household Architecture

Architect / Designer:

Joaquin Millan

Studio:

OOIIO Architecture

Design Team:

Architect: Joaquin Millán Villamuelas
Team: Jesús Reyes García, Milda Düdonyte, Alba Peña Fernández.

Copyright:

Javier de Paz

Country:

Spain

Tornado House is located in a quiet residential area of Madrid capital. It is a domestic project tailor designed to a family with two children.

Everything is though for them, every space, every detail. During the home design and construction process, all decisions always started from listening to the needs of those who would be the inhabitants of the house, in order to be able to give the closest possible response to their tastes, budget, lifestyle.

Its architecture is simple and emphatic, as well as purely functional and practical. Its carefully composed prismatic volumes stand out greatly from the neighboring homes. The house is perceived in its surroundings as an abstract object that, without seeking eccentricity or ostentation, has the appearance of a contemporary container perfectly equipped to protect and provide maximum comfort to the family that lives inside.

The project arose during creative work sessions imagining a home that is designed three-dimensionally like a large “jenga game”.

The architects started from an imaginary, completely solid, prismatic volume, which they shaped by strategically pushing and subtracting pieces until they achieved the final shape.

Thus, for example, by “pressing” the cover of the initial solid prism, a central patio emerges flooding the entire heart of the house with light, and helping to control the Madrid´s warm summer temperature by cross ventilation with the rooms.

By “pushing” the lower area of the blind prism, they eliminate part of its volume to obtain shaded and cool porches where we can interact more with the garden, “Longing” a part towards the street they generated the garage.

The architects designed this residential object based on an abstraction, an idea only possible in the world of imagination, where one can create a building in a simple way by pushing and stretching parts of a blind solid, as if it would not cost any work to do it, until a habitable cluster of rooms is configured.

Once this volumetric game was achieved, the architects provided the house with the maximum contemporary technical existing features in the contemporary family residential market to achieve a highly efficient and sustainable building.

Apart from the aforementioned passive elements such as porches and central patio that achieve freshness and promote cross ventilation, pergolas were incorporated to obtain more shaded areas when vegetation grows on them. The exterior walls are also covered with a double skin of ceramic pieces as a “ventilated façade” that contributes enormously to passive energy savings by creating a camera between ceramics and internal façade for a better temperature control.

The interior is heated with Aero Thermic underfloor heating and also is equipped with an interior air recovery and filtration system. Mechanism that, together with an installation of solar panels for electricity generation, mean that the house has practically zero daily energy consumption.

OOIIO Architecture

Founded in 2010, OOIIO’s architecture is playful, fun, ironic and fresh. For them, the construction of a project is a joyful event, a magical human process that deserves to be celebrated. That is why their buildings are based on casual approaches.

Creativity is key in the daily life of the OOIIO architecture studio, they frequently use “the link” as a project tool when conceiving their solutions, creating links or metaphorical relationships in their buildings to other things: a rock, artisan traditional ceramics, a windmill, that suddenly become the spark idea to create a new building.

A unique creative method that allows OOIIO to open unexpected paths in architecture.

OOIIO does diagrammatic architecture. Their projects can be explained in a few quick, visceral drawings, making it possible to simplify all the complexity of their constructions in a few strokes on a napkin.
OOIIO’s quest to do things in the easiest possible way, , proposing simple solutions to complex problems

We encourage designers and architects to share their best projects with the rest of the world so as to inspire the next generation and gain global recognition.