El Guateque starts on a Frankenstein pre-existence: a mid XX century self-built house modified by an uncompleted refurbishment to transform it into a single-family house.

Designed and conducted by Barcelona-based architects Adrià Escolano and David Steegman

The transformation was left unfinished due to the 2008’s economic crisis, leaving a series of interior spaces without scale, form and hierarchy resulting from multiple modifications, amputations and demolitions.

The project, located in Barcelona, resolves the division of this proto-house into two independent units. The recreational devices organises the program in three categories: backstage, frontstage and ‘behind the scenes’ spaces.

The intervention focuses on the backstage, accumulating in a single technical piece of furniture the facilities, storage and necessary equipment for the house.

Present on the three floors of the houses.

The furniture's closing panels, a suspended scenography, build a background landscape for the living space.

The client didn’t want the frontstage to undergo any design action, he wanted to keep its morphology unchanged: the space would be activated through its furniture.

Who works as a decorator for advertising sets.

The architects’ interventions, using a unique color tone, are limited to the opening of windows and doors, the floor, and the application of insulation and plaster on all visible faces.

The spaces ‘behind the scenes’. are those programs that remain outside the central space but complete the operation of the two houses. El Guateque works as a scenographic artifact.

Such as associations on each floor between the bathrooms and the exterior, and circulation spaces, solved as a whole with the same materiality.