Removable walls

Have you imagined a building with walls that move according to the needs of its inhabitants? The evolution of space is accompanied by economic considerations. Pensioners, for example, may find it advantageous to sell rooms in a house that is too large and expensive to maintain to the next-door neighbor. Or segregate it in two to rent or sell. In countries like Japan and Holland it is already done and pioneering Spanish companies are working on it. The use of housing space in a flexible way is called open building.

The ACR construction group is about to start a flexible apartment building in Zizur Mayor, a town five kilometers from Pamplona. There are ten officially protected homes that will have from one to three bedrooms. “The owners of each home will define it throughout the useful life of the building according to their needs. We have designed modules with installation corridors, prepared to accommodate a bathroom and kitchen. Two modules make up a one-bedroom dwelling, and each module is one more room.

Neighbors can sell modules to each other, or segregate some of them to make a new house. The work to do it is clean and only lasts a few days”, says Íñigo Díaz de Cerio, technical director of Real Estate Development at ACR Grupo. The house they have devised is a kind of gigantic meccano of factory-made modules.