T3 - Story

By: Maria Helene Saether, Rafal Strzelczak and Lisanne Alexandre

Story

In 1999 Francisco de Blas approached the Spanish architect Alberto Campo Baeza. He gave him a book with the poems of Luis Cernuda. It’s a book full of intense emotions, translated in poems. The populair poem ‘Donde habite el olvido’ describes a world where one leaves aside all their problems to achieve the desired freedom. Francisco sent this poem to the architect and it was clear that he wanted something more than just a house. He wanted a home where emotions and thoughts were considered as part of the construction material. The house refers to a cave and opposite to a hut. 

In 2000 the house was finished and Francisco moved to it together with his girlfriend Sara. In 2002 they decided to get married and in 2003 their firstborn Pablo came to the world. They were very happy with the three of them, but they also liked to expand a little bit more later. 

A few years later there dream came true and Sara got pregnant again. In 2006 Diego was born, but unfortunately he has a severe form of autism. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction, verbal and non-verbal communication. Also with some forms it can happen that there is a restricted and repetitive behaviour. But that’s something which develops over the years.   The first few months they didn’t notice anything different about Diego than they had with Pablo. But then the differences started to notice..
By 12 months: no babbling and no gesturing like pointing and waving.
By 16 months: no single words.
By 24 months: no two-word phrases.
And as the time went by, they could see that Diego has a loss of any language or social skill. He would have that for the rest of his life, at any age.Although they found it hard, they made the best of their lives together. Gladly Diego his favourite colour is green, whenever he would go bad, they could just sit him in front of the glass and he would go calm again.   

Unless till now, 2015. Diego is 9 now and living with him gets harder everyday. They are having contact with different psychiatrics in the surrounding, but they also wanted to ask us, as architects, how we could make there lives any easier.
Not only for the sake of Diego, but also for there own and there son Pablo, who gets mostly forgotten.