DRZ by ba-rro: A Former Car Wash Becomes a Polychromatic Argument in Carabanchel

An Industrial Shell in Carabanchel

In Madrid's Carabanchel — a district whose urban grain still carries the residue of light industry, small workshops, and a working-class city that has not entirely been smoothed over — ba-rro has rehabilitated a 174-square-metre former car wash into a dwelling that resists easy categorisation. The project, completed in 2025, was conceived not as a conversion but as a spatial experiment: a testing ground for new models of urban living that take the industrial typology seriously rather than treating it as an obstacle to be cleared.

The Madrid studio, founded by Marta Badiola and Jorge Pizarro Montalvillo, has built a practice around exactly this kind of productive collision — between what a building already is and what an architectural response can unlock in it. DRZ draws an explicit reference to the New York lofts of the 1960s and 70s: those raw, undifferentiated volumes in which living was less prescribed than discovered, where spatial identity emerged from occupation rather than plan. But ba-rro's reading is not nostalgic. It translates the loft typology into a specifically Carabanchel register, drawing its material language from the neighbourhood's own industrial vocabulary.

The Constellation Principle

DRZ operates on a logic ba-rro describe as a constellation: a distribution of objects across the plan that appears disordered but is precisely calibrated. Walls, doors, furniture, balconies, railings, shutters, pillars, and beams accumulate without hierarchy — each element interrupting the volumetric neutrality of the shell and suggesting possibilities for use rather than prescribing them. The spatial result is a dwelling that functions like a field of choices: improvised, reconfigurable, and alive to how its occupants move through it on any given day.

"The domestic order is real; only the hierarchy has been removed. What reads as disorder is a score — one that plays differently each day."

The programme itself is deliberately open-ended. DRZ is designed to absorb not only domestic life but its productive and social extensions: an office, a studio, a small exhibition space, a temporary event venue. This programmatic porosity is not incidental — it reflects ba-rro's conviction that the most relevant residential architecture today is the kind that holds the relationship between work, living, and the city in productive suspension rather than fixing it.

The threshold makes this argument most explicit. Rather than a conventional façade, ba-rro installs an ephemeral one: a metal door salvaged from the surrounding neighbourhood — familiar enough to read as continuous with the street — that folds entirely open or closes back on itself. Behind it sits a glass door, creating a layered epidermis through which the dwelling calibrates its visibility. The threshold is not a fixed limit but an adjustable instrument.

Colour as Structural Notation

The material strategy at DRZ is inseparable from its chromatic one. Ba-rro work with the metals, glass, and salvaged elements that Carabanchel's industrial inheritance makes available, and they deploy colour across them not as finish but as structural signifier. Greens, reds, and blues are distributed through the space as notational marks: each hue corresponding to a different register of use, material weight, or spatial moment. The apparent visual complexity this produces is, on closer reading, a precise score — colour doing the work that conventional demarcation would otherwise perform through walls and thresholds alone.

This is not polychromatic excess. It is polychromatic argument. The accumulation is precisely calibrated, and the discipline behind it becomes legible only through sustained attention — which is exactly the kind of looking DRZ rewards.

Why SILCO HAUS Selected This Project

DRZ enters the SILCO HAUS edit for the precision with which it positions colour as spatial intelligence rather than decoration. Ba-rro's polychromatic accumulation is not exuberance — it is argument. Each hue functions as structure: marking a register of use, a material distinction, a moment in the spatial score. The project demonstrates with particular clarity what SILCO HAUS considers the most productive territory in contemporary residential architecture: the zone where industrial materiality and chromatic expression are held in active tension, where restraint and richness are not opposites but instruments that reinforce each other.

In refusing the neutrals that still dominate so much residential work, DRZ makes the case that a dwelling can be simultaneously raw and precise, industrial and inhabited, formally demanding and genuinely liveable. That combination is rare. It is exactly the territory this edit is built to document.

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DRZ by ba-rro  ·  Photography: Maru Serrano  ·  Curated by SILCO HAUS, March 2026
All images © Maru Serrano. Text © SILCO HAUS 2026.