Panagiotopoulos House

An old house between party walls located in the Historic Center of Seville, with a degree of partial protection, three levels built and a plot area of 70m2, was acquired by a family who had lived a large part of their life abroad, and whose initial requirements were decisive for the final solution: building two independent houses on three floors (leaving the ground floor as a unit for temporary rent), implanting the patio with the smallest possible area according to local regulations (with the aim of gaining the entire buildable surface allowed) and locate all daytime spaces on the upper level (in order to enjoy the best lighting conditions in the living and dining areas).

The General Plan of Seville requires that every patio built to illuminate and ventilate living spaces must be able to circumscribe a diameter defined by its maximum height. Therefore, a patio with a circular outline is precisely the patio with the smallest surface possible, and consequently the one that allowed the largest built surface available for homes.

From this decision (the shape of the patio) a series of forced relationships and geometric conditions were generated that practically unleashed the final solution. In this way, the only staircase that adequately connected all the levels was a circular staircase, the optimal interstitial circulation spaces were those equidistant from the curves and the divisions between the rests of the spaces were most naturally in tune with these lines.