Working to challenge the conventions attributed to increasingly constrained urban residential interiors, Madrid-based speculative architecture practice HANGHAR debuts Studiolo, a room-within-a-room installation with no predetermined purpose.
“Domestic space has been overly commodified in the last century, as real estate has become much more prolific,” said Eduardo Mediero, founder and principal of the Madrid-based practice HANGHAR. “This has severely affected not only how we dwell but also how our homes are designed.” The practice is deliberately intended to only exist for one decade—it will close in 2030—and in this time, is committed to developing speculative work that tries to subvert market-driven impacts and decommodify residential architecture. It accomplishes this by suggesting different spatial configurations that can accommodate less prescriptive functions.
In creating the form of the recently completed Studiolo project, Mediero and his team reexamined the importance of the “room” as an architectural entity—one that has the potential for open, unconstrained activation. “Our intention was not to assign a specific use to a space and try to make that use as efficient as possible, but rather to create a spatial structure that does not convey the use or program assigned to it,” Mediero explains. “We were interested in how inefficient environments can open up a vast array of possibilities of use.” Drawing inspiration from Renaissance artist Antonello da Messina, specifically his painting Saint Jerome in his Study (1475), HANGHAR introduced a deep-green, cabinet-like room within Mediero’s own central Madrid apartment. This space functions as his own “little studio,” the direct translation of the Italian word from which the project takes its name.
Studiolos were popularized by humanist philosophers, during the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras, as oft-secluded spaces for unfettered contemplation and ideation. In a bid to establish these enclosed environments as spaces for “retirement and thinking, for dedicated intellectual research,” as the firm’s project description states, they were decorated with more abstracted detail than ornamentation or furnishing that might implicitly suggest a set function, a dining room with tables and chairs and perhaps even paintings of fruit. Messina’s painting illustrates a space with just the essentials: a desk, stool, and shelves to contain manuscripts. Reconstituted at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Federico da Montefeltro’s 15th-century Palazzo Ducale di Gubbio studiolo is lined with trompe-l’oeil inlaid wood panels depicting different allegorical scenes. Incorporated iconography denotes the study of music, geography, alchemy, and ornithology.
Within Mediero’s apartment, the HANGHAR Studiolo is completely decontextualized from its residential surroundings materially. Surfaces are clad in a restrained palette of colored MDF panels, floor and steps covered in Pirelli rubber (a component more readily found in factories), and the drop ceiling is supported by industrial-grade galvanized steel profiles.
The “aseptic,” minimal, and formally universal architecture can act as a study, a lounge, or even a bedroom. To accommodate an undefined set of potential uses, distinct furnishings from Mediero and his partner’s personal collection are carefully staged right “outside” the room within a room. But Studiolo itself is a piece of furniture as well.
“For me architecture is definite,” Mediero said. “It’s unmovable, strict, and timeless. It’s the structures within which we live, the backdrop of our lives. Everything else is light, movable, and temporary—the components that suggest purpose and activity.”
Given a recent uptick in international interest in Madrid real estate, most of HANGHAR’s work has centered on residential commissions. But as the conceptual Studiolo project reveals, the firm aims to design these spaces with a far less commodified approach and confront various aspects of that convention: standard layouts and rooms designated solely as bedrooms or living rooms, for example.
Though operating with a for-profit model, HANGHAR answers to the OWN Foundation’s board of trustees, and so its mission is much more focused on developing new typologies through rigorous empirical research, analysis, and eventual provocation. Extending that mission to academia, Mediero teaches and lectures at institutions like the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and Harvard GSD. His work was exhibited at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale.