Tornado House is a house located in Calle del Tornado, Barajas, Madrid, Spain. Designed by OOIIO Architecture, this domestic project is tailored to a family with two children. Architecture is simple and emphatic, as well as purely functional and practical, creating a contemporary building that protects and provides maximum comfort to its inhabitants.
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, way of life, aspirations…
That is why Tornado is actually like a suit, a true “tailor-made house”. 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.
Interiors are 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.
Total comfort adapted to the inhabitants of the house, achieved by understanding that natural light must flood every corner of the home. Interior spaces are worked through a sober and functional design, playing with warm and calm materials, with raw finishes in soft tones combining very well with each other, continuing inside the same carefully composed and balanced material game of the exterior volumes.
