Stories of Contemporary Domesticity, curated by Archt. for Archisearch, explores different interpretations of the notion of home through an open dialogue with contemporary architectural approaches to housing.
If architecture’s most existential condition is that it outlives both its creators and its inhabitants, SOCO’s response lifts its apparent stillness through adaptability and bareness. In the twenty-sixth episode of the series, Casa Iriarte presents the house as a corporeal existence, assembled through distinct materialities according to their lifespans: a home conceived not as a finished object, but as a living domestic infrastructure prepared to accommodate functional, technical and programmatic transformations throughout its life. Here, more than ever, home becomes another body: a concrete skeleton, Canarian volcanic picón flesh, a timber heart, a patio as lungs, and an ever-changing face of demountable façades.
Rough, heavy materials paradoxically shape the house as a volatile creature—not through their impermanence, but through their designed capacity to accommodate replacement and change. Casa Iriarte is a transformable concrete house that resists the fixity of completion and categorisation, framing home as a queer, open-ended arrangement and domesticity as an acceptance of the possibility of being transformed.
The historic centre of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, shaped around the neighbourhoods of Vegueta and Triana, is an architecture of narrow streets, compact plots and inward-looking houses, where Atlantic and Spanish traditions overlap.
Behind often restrained masonry façades, patios draw light and ventilation deep into elongated plans, organising domestic life around an interior void while producing a built fabric profoundly calibrated to the island’s climate. Within this dense urban condition, where adaptation and incremental transformation have long shaped the built environment, SOCO sculpts Casa Iriarte from the constraint of a narrow urban plot into an architecture of possibility, conceived to evolve alongside those who build and inhabit it.
“Our work is rooted in a deep relationship with the territory of the Canary Islands. We observe, distil and reinterpret the essential elements of the landscape, material culture and local architecture, transforming them into contemporary projects capable of engaging in dialogue with their surroundings,” state SOCO.
Unapologetically rising between neighbouring buildings as a distinct concrete tower, Casa Iriarte allows tradition, experimentation and technical knowledge to coexist naturally.
The familiar Canarian patio is displaced from its expected position to become the house’s climatic lung, while local materials, labour and familiar construction techniques are reassembled into a structure that unsettles conventional domestic compartmentalisation and construction hierarchies. By embracing narrowness as a local urban idiom, SOCO expands it from constraint into possibility: a framework within which everyday life can be organised, performed, undone and organised again.
A House Without Fixed Rooms
Casa Iriarte proposes what we might call ‘queer domesticity’: home not as a collection of predetermined functions, but as a territory under constant negotiation.
Here, queer describes neither an aesthetic identity nor simply a synonym for flexibility; rather, it names an architecture that resists prescribing how bodies, rooms and functions should relate to one another. In Queer Phenomenology, British-Australian feminist scholar and writer Sara Ahmed understands orientation through the familiar lines, objects and spatial relations by which bodies find their place in the world; to queer these orientations is to depart from established lines, allowing other relations to become possible.
Read through this lens, Casa Iriarte emerges as a queer infrastructure precisely because it supports without prescribing identity: rooms can change functions, uses can overlap, and domestic life can continually reorient itself within the architectural framework.
Large rooms unfold as continuous, flexible volumes, borrowing from the logic of the enfilade: one space opening directly onto the next, producing continuity rather than separation. Yet, unlike its historical counterpart, hierarchy disappears.
There is no privileged salon, dining room or study; movable furniture and occupation temporarily give each room its identity.
The house can therefore accommodate both living and working without drawing a definitive line between the two. Home and studio exist instead as shifting intensities within the same spatial structure. A room can expand into another, surrender its function or acquire an entirely new one without demanding that the architecture itself be rewritten. What remains permanent is not programme, but the capacity for change.
There is something quietly radical in this refusal to predict domestic life. Rather than designing around an ideal inhabitant and a prescribed sequence of habits, SOCO provides an architecture that can be appropriated, negotiated and transformed. The house is finished precisely because it allows itself to remain open.
It is here that its queerness becomes spatial by suspending some of the classifications through which domestic architecture traditionally stabilises everyday life—bedroom, living room, workplace, circulation, permanence. If, as Ahmed suggests, orientation depends upon the lines we repeatedly follow until they become familiar, Casa Iriarte leaves some of those lines deliberately unresolved.
Its rooms remain available to unexpected trajectories, alternative occupations and other forms of proximity.
What Must Endure, What Can Change
This distinction between permanence and transformation moves from plan to construction. Casa Iriarte is conceived almost as an architecture of different temporalities: elements are not expected to age together, nor are they asked to.
A reinforced-concrete skeleton and exposed walls of Canarian volcanic picón block—deeply embedded in the islands’ building culture—constitute the enduring body of the house, with an estimated lifespan exceeding 80–100 years. Against this heavy, long-term structure, lightweight timber partitions, carpentry and interior elements operate on shorter cycles of approximately 25–40 years. Modular, demountable façades occupy an intermediate lifespan of approximately 30–50 years, conceived as independent layers capable of renewal without disturbing the load-bearing structure.
Sustainability thus becomes a question of time before it becomes one of technology: an exercise in deciding what must endure and what should be allowed to change. Rather than treating the building as a finished object whose integrity must be preserved indefinitely, SOCO understands it as domestic infrastructure—a durable framework capable of absorbing functional, material and technical transformations throughout its life.
The concrete frame does not dictate what life inside it must become; it establishes the material conditions that allow different lives to unfold.
Permanence and indeterminacy are therefore not opposites but accomplices: the more stable the support, the greater the freedom for what it supports to remain unresolved.
An Insular Ethics of Sufficiency
This economy is inseparable from the condition of building on an island. In the Canary Islands, where many construction materials must be imported and local resources remain finite, every material decision carries additional weight—economically, environmentally and logistically. Casa Iriarte responds not by accumulating technological solutions, but by asking how little architecture actually needs.
“We prioritise reuse, the adaptation of existing structures and the conscious use of resources, seeking to extend the lifespan of buildings and generate a positive impact on their surroundings. For us, architecture is not an object, but a living system that connects place, culture and people,” explain SOCO.
Building with what is available, trusting familiar techniques and local labour, and eliminating the redundant become forms of resilience.
The project’s sufficiency therefore lies less in technological autonomy than in an attitude towards resources—an architecture calibrated to its means and conscious of its limits.
Perhaps this is where the seemingly contradictory character of Casa Iriarte becomes clearest. Its concrete body is robust, almost stubbornly permanent, while the domestic life it shelters is deliberately unstable. The skeleton stays; life moves through it.
Rooms change allegiance, timber elements are replaced, façades are renewed, programmes appear and disappear.
Aligned with the sense of place yet indeterminately unique, Casa Iriarte could be read through Gordon Matta-Clark’s notion of “Anarchitecture”: as a condition open to appropriation and reinterpretation, one that questions permanence, functionality and even the authority of the architect, allowing unexpected relations to emerge between bodies and space.
In this concrete tower in Las Palmas, architecture becomes less an answer to how we should live than a durable framework within which that answer can keep changing.
Facts & Credits
Project title Casa Iriarte
Typology Stories of Contemporary Domesticity, House, Residential
Episode 26th
Location Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain
Area 230m2
Status Completed, 2025
Architecture SOCO | Iñaki Pérez Anzola, Pablo Delgado Núñez
Collaborators Susana Aparicio Lorenzo, Santiago Brillas Ruiz de la Prada
Photography Simone Marcolin
References
Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Matta-Clark, G. (2006) Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings. Edited by G. Moure. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa.