Through his music he has updated the roots of flamenco without dispensing with the auto tune. And with his videos, what Antón Álvarez, alias C. Tangana, is that everyone can see inside architectural gems built in Spain during the second half of the 20th century, and that can hardly be visited today. Because they have an owner and because they are residential, as is the case with the house that pretended to be owned by the singer in the video clip of his song eat you whole (2021). That house was built by the architect Javier Carvajal in the sixties in one of the Somosaguas housing estates on the outskirts of Madrid, using exposed reinforced concrete walls and nods to the brutalism of the time.
For The blame, the song that the man from Madrid has released together with Canelita, Daviles de Novelda and Omar Montes, Santos Bacana, director of C. Tangana’s latest videos, needed a setting that could imitate a rehabilitation center for men, something like a complex dedicated to healing his toxic masculinity. And he found a site that was the hit: a single-family house on the outskirts of Elche that had been built in 1984 according to the Provencal style adopted by the buildings in the area.
However, the video clip, which also includes some scenes in a four-star hotel surrounded by the famous palm trees of the Levantine city, was not recorded inside the original house, but in the extension that the Barcelona studio measure signed in 2015. It is told by the architect responsible for the project and one of the five founding partners of this office, Benjamin Iborra: “Despite the fact that it was a very impersonal dwelling, because the chalet is located in the center of the plot and does not create any hierarchy in its landscape, the house has acquired a certain charm over the years, the people who live in it they have made it their own”.
Iborra knows this because he has been there countless times. He knows the owners, they are family members and there is a close relationship: “They wanted us to make some annexes to the house, like some lumps in different parts that would not be noticed, but in a house of these characteristics, with so many years and such a concrete architecture, yes or yes they were going to be noticed. And faking the effect didn’t make sense,” he notes.
The proposal they put forward was not intended to deny existing housing. He respected it, generating another lower-rise building separated by a joint and housing what the architects were asked for: a guest bedroom with a bathroom, whose interior simulated the rooms of Daviles and Canelita in the video, a very large porch that acts entrance to the main house and the garden, and a multipurpose living room, reserved in the video clip for the psychiatric consultation and the therapy room. In addition, the new building comes with an added landscaping function: it creates a warmer and more humane outdoor space, by turning its back on the problem tennis court, it made the plot of land seem huge and too vast.
It took two years to resolve the extension. The client did not demand a delivery date from them, which allowed measure, who had not done any work to date, focus on the small details. What they spent the most time on was deciding the type of brick that the annex building would have. They thought of a warm brown caravan and, after reviewing many models, they contacted a company there that manufactured one by hand with a wide and horizontal format of 40 by 3.5 centimeters with which they managed to make the walls have a scale human. That is, they are not much taller than a person of standard height. On the roof, a series of vaults grow upwards so that the owners do not get overwhelmed when they are inside. The vaults also ventilate, allow daylight to pass through and contain something that is not seen in C. Tangana’s video, although it is essential for day-to-day life: the drains.
The family of the house, by the way, was present at the shoot: “It’s logical. For this type of thing, you have to be there making sure that there is no smoking inside the house, that things don’t break… With so many people, either you are very vigilant or something could happen. But the truth is that in this case absolutely nothing happened”, reports the architect, who also did not miss the appointment: “It lasted very little, in one morning they had already recorded all the plans”.
Were you surprised that the house could go through a rehabilitation center? “It doesn’t shock me that in the video the tennis court lends itself to being the courtyard of something similar to a prison, or that the facade fits the aesthetic of outdated glamor that they were looking for. I see it and think ‘well, it’s coherent’, and I think it’s because of the timelessness that the work has at an architectural and material level”, considers Iborra. “Because it is not modern or current. It is a minimal house, which has nothing to do with being minimalist”.
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