Ferrer House at Rocafort, an Early Case of Brise-Soleil’s Design for the Mediterranean Region in Valencia

In 1944, the architect Antonio Gómez Davó designed and built a new house for Mr. Ferrer at Rocafort in the suburbs of Valencia (Spain). In this same year, Europe, America, Russia and even Japan were still at war and Spain was recovering from its own intestine conflict. Therefore, architectural innovations and influences were scarce, as was the circulation of specialized journals on the matter. Still, many creations were occurring, like ceramic vaults and the brise-soleil; further, the architect Le Corbusier had stated his profound nostalgia for the Mediterranean, a sea that he had come to appreciate in his travels to the “East”. In the case of Gómez Davó, having been born and raised in a prominent family of Valencia, he could not remain indifferent to the design features that appeared in the vernacular architecture of the area, especially the type of inclined louvers of Arabic descent, that covered bow-windows and balconies and which have come to be known in Spain as the Majorcan louvers; these are currently even employed by prominent architects like Rafael Moneo at the extension of the Painter Miro Foundation. However, with so many difficult circumstances surrounding him, Gómez Davó could not get to the point of producing a ground-breaking design based on solar assumptions for the whole façade of the house he was building; instead, when providing an entrance porch apt for living life in the pure Mediterranean tradition, he ventured to construct a surprising perforated wall oriented to the south in order to control radiation in the winter and provide shade in the summer while affording excellent light and superb conditions of ventilation. By means of self-devised simulation tools, we have analyzed the conditions of the house and especially of his innovative brise-soleil, which are at times reminiscent of Alvar Aalto’s solutions for day-lit roofs, and which he intuitively adapted to the latitude of Valencia with the help of incipient notions of solar geometry. By outlining such unknown and bold precedent and assessing the house’s proper climatic performance, we contribute to revitalizing the early and daring pioneers of solar architecture in peripheral Spain and Europe during the birth of critic regionalism, a fact often disregarded in the conventional history of Modern Architecture.