ARCHITECTURAL RENOVATION USING TRADITIONAL TECHNOLOGIES, LOCAL MATERIALS AND ARTISAN’S LABOR IN CATALONIA

Abstract

Abstract. The use of traditional techniques when restoring a masia is always the primary consideration in the preliminary phase of the project and during the site work. The virtues of traditional techniques compared to industrial production systems are described from multiple points of view: as a sustainable contemporary strategy, as generators of healthy spaces , as virtues of social and territorial scale, as a better formal contextualisation due to the limitations of pre-industrial materials. These are virtues that the industrial system has forgotten. The purpose of the Can Buch project (a masia in Northen Catalonia, Spain) was to restore the main house, some sheds and a barn, to enable rural ecotourism and to create a residence for the owner and future manager of the property. The promoter of the project intended to apply the values of permaculture. Maximising the use of Km0 materials from the start emphasised this intention. If we understand the traditional farmhouse as the site's resource map, applying this reality to the present work means recovering original representative principles. Currently, the project is in the last phase of works, but the results of applying this philosophy are already visible. It is intended to demonstrate the advantages of this self-limitation on a sustainable, environmental, territorial and compositional level.