Located on the corner of Barcelona's Eixample, the refurbishment of the old bar required the creation of a new spatial formulation that was in line with its new identity, associated quite freely with traditional Catalan cuisine. For this reason, a new system of vaults that allows the reconstruction of a succession of different areas and that gives the space a domestic character without losing a continuous perception between the different areas has been created. Starting from the pre-existing V-shaped floor plan, the intervention focuses on the flat sky, which consists of a sequence of semicircular wooden vaults with variable diameters. Once the formal rules of the game have been defined, they are strictly followed. This construction system extends to the façade line and intersects with the pre-existence freely at all its points. In this way, the meeting of the flat sky with the façade allows to show the section surrounded through the windows, so that the profile of the interior space is cut on the outer limit. The section thus becomes the showcase itself. But there is no system without exception. In the way of access, the extradose of the vaults has been seen as a plot to make its non-structural character evident and thus reinforce its scenographic and fictional character. All identity is based on a symbolic construction.

This project was born from the radicalisation of everything that seemed valuable to us in the domestic typological tradition of Barcelona's Eixample district. Thus, the type plants are formalised following the distribution of equal (or almost equal) rooms that traditionally characterised the housing of the area at the end of the 19th century. Homes that have seen their use modified over the decades without substantial changes. An apparently rigid system that, nevertheless, has allowed its use to change over time. Understanding this typological condition, the housing building has been conceived as a system of rooms in which each apartment can be expanded or reduced - by adding or subtracting pieces - to respond to the future needs of its inhabitants. With this flexibility in mind, the rooms have similar dimensions allowing to eliminate any kind of spatial hierarchy and program predetermination. Each floor can be defined and reprogrammed as needed, even the position of the kitchen can vary. This flexibility is possible thanks to the location of the bathrooms, where the vertical installations that can connect to all the rooms are concentrated. Initially, each floor is divided into 4 apartments of 5 rooms connected to each other without the need for a corridor. The kitchen is placed in the centre, the other rooms can be used, indiscriminately, as bedrooms, studies or living rooms. The ground floor, for its part, reinterprets the traditional and popular halls of the Eixample, where marble and large spaces define the place of reception and representation. As large habitable objects, traditional furniture is transformed here into petri volumes placed in the middle of a large open space. The uncovered interior courtyards allow for natural ventilation and literally turn the ground floor into an extension of the garden and the street, where it rains. Something similar happens with the façade, where the traditional archetypal composition has been directly replicated. The façade is proposed following a direct reinterpretation of the "ordinary" and traditional architecture of the Cerdà’s Eixample, in which lime stucco with decorative motifs, vertical openings, balconies and shutters predominate.

The exhibition Species of Spaces, based on Perec’s homonymous book, aims to transform the generic space of a museum into a particular one. That is the starting point of the display designed by maio, where a new system of square rooms of identical dimensions define and organize a series of works along the exhibition space. The display for the exhibition consists in the creation of a grid of rooms within one of the circular spaces of Richard Meier’s building. The second floor of the MACBA becomes a domestic-like space where works of art are placed all along the rooms. The 4,8 x 4,8 m grid allows the construction of a maze-like space, where the specificity of each space is defined by the content but not the continent. The labyrinthine perception arises here by means of a strict repetition of rationality and modularity. Only some windows, strategically placed, communicate the rooms between them. The walls have been painted in a subtle pink gradient that decreases towards white as the installation gets nearer to the end of the room. The design deals with Perec’s idea of the ordinary and uses a common dry-wall system where the steel studs are uncovered and visible in the doors situated at the corners of the room.

The project creates a garden inside the block at street level. The initial requirements are to create a pleasant atmosphere considering the physical conditions and generate a continuous reading from the interior of the building to the courtyard. The ground floor and the patio present a sequence of geometric elements that mark the different rhythms of the route and living room. The marble volume is replaced by the plant volume. Natural light and the way in which it gradually becomes present, always with reference to the end of the open garden, is an important part of this transition. The introduction of vegetation begins with a fall of vegetation from a planter located on the first floor that filters the light entering the interior of the lobby. Once outside, a vegetable corridor is generated thanks to a fence that encloses the ground floor terraces forming a vegetable cube. The next step is a circle of gravel drawn on the marble pavement enhanced with trees of different ports. The plant species mix the deciduous leaf with the perennial creating different sensations. Finally, and as a transition between the two patio levels, the hexagonal pool is placed. In this case, the vegetation closes the space in the perimeter creating a perennial background with a certain tropical character. The vegetation together with the building materials are subjected to this transit from changing to fixed generating different atmospheres or rooms within the site. These rooms have complementary elements such as the ramp, the shower or the chimney cylinder. The colours of the building are complemented by the plants’ green tonalities, almost always playing with the yellow of the marble, the green and the white of the tiles. In the garden, the colours of the vegetation predominate: the pink and lilac blooms in early spring, the bright green of the first leaves of the Parthenocissus on the garden walls that slowly recover after winter, the intense green of summer, the yellowish and orange tones of the background during autumn and the bare branches in winter.

Located in Sant Feliu de Llobregat, in a suburban neighbourhood, the plot with rectangular shape has an area of 923.34 m2. It is bordered on the south-east and south-west by the communal area of a eight floors apartment building, and on the north-east with with several buildings of industrial use, and to the Northwest with the Anselm Clavé street. The four-story multi-family building will have 40 social housing units, with a ground floor plus five floors, and will include two basement floors (parking and storage rooms). It is an orthogonal parallelepiped volume with two nuclei of vertical communication. The standard plants are arranged around these two nuclei and one open space, with eight dwellings per floor. The units composed of generic spaces, non-hierarchical, flexible and adaptable to changes in the vital needs of its inhabitants, and which simultaneously develop several simultaneous strategies that complement each other and have in common the improvement of living conditions, urban construction, social equality and meeting the challenges of sustainability. The ground floor follows the shape and language of the urban space for greater integration between the two. A hard pavement route is maintained to facilitate the accessibility and maintenance of the urban space, and two volumes are located to accommodate retail spaces without a definite use, the communications core of stairs and elevator. And the roof floor is passable for community use.