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HOUSE IN PEMBROKESHIRE (WALES), BY FUTURE SYSTEM
A member of the British Parliament and millionaire, Bob Marshall-Andrews had spent his vacations in an old timber army barrack for twenty-five years. Undoubtedly, the value of this shelter lay in its location. It stood on a cliff in a National Park, on the coast of southwest Wales. It was an idyllic place and highly protected, which meant that building licences had in general not be given to the people who lived there. Any alterations, even including extending people’s houses with a delicate glass structures, were prohibited.
Despite these conditions, and being conscious of possible accusations of favouritism, the Member of Parliament contacted the architectural office, Future Systems, with the intention of substituting the old barrack with a house where he could live when he retired. It was an essential requirement of the commission to achieve a legal project at all costs.
National Park in Pembrokeshire
The land on Druidston cliff overlooking St Bride’s Bay, which the Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews and his wife Gill owned, was only one hundred and fifty metres from the sea. This spectacular site was situated in one of the most beautiful National Parks in England and Wales, dating back to 1949. The Park covers almost 300 km of coastline characterized by great diversity of high cliffs and long, open beaches, protected bays, marshes and dunes. The park boasts a coastal footpath that allows the visitors to cross it completely while observing several protected offshore islands. Among them one can see Skomer, Skokholm, Ramsey, Grasholm and Caldey, all internationally known for their seabird and seal populations.
Mr and Mrs Marshall-Andrews had bought the land many years ago. An old army barrack stood on it, which had been used as a shelter in the past but the couple had used it to spend their vacations with their two children. As the barrack was deteriorating, the couple decided to approach Jan Kaplicky and Amanda Levete, the founding architects of Future Systems, for their new holiday house.
An Invisible House
The severe regulations operating in the National Park against any kind of construction had led the neighbours to believe that any action in this landscape would prove impossible. Knowing this, the architects were faced with designing a house that would lie discretely on the ground without drawing attention from the main attractions: nature and wildlife. This would serve as the proving point to obtain building permission.
As a way of preventing the risk of receiving an unfavourable decision from the local authorities, the architects designed a house that could not be rejected on the grounds that it impinged on the landscape. Their solution lay in building downwards and thus reinforce the relationship with the surroundings. It was a idea that recalls old traditional building methods in Northern Scandinavia where the wide walls were built of overlapping layers of soil and turf, a technique that bound the soil to the roots, worked as a thermal insulation and completed the camouflage with the land.
The architects responded to these conditions by creating a house that was hardly visible in the landscape. From afar, the house adopts the form of a hillock with big glazed panels opening towards the sea. Firstly, Kaplicky and Levete excavated the site. They constructed a concrete slab and a retaining wall on which a stressed-skin plywood aerofoil roof was laid, completed with membrane and turf planting. The structure consisted of steel beams that supported the roof and eliminated the need for internal columns.
Due to the narrowness of the road, big trucks could not approach the site, only standard trucks. Drawing upon their experience in using sophisticated technology, Jan Kaplicky and Amanda Levete considered it would be the least harmful to the delicate nature of the site if they could prefabricate the house in small units and bring them to the site ready to be arranged. Many elements were therefore prepared and constructed before reaching the site like the two bathroom pods, which were intended to screen the central living area from the bedrooms. These spray-painted timber structures, of which one also incorporated kitchen facilities, were freestanding without touching the ceiling in order to emphasize the light, bright space.
The ground plan of the house is very simple and with an ease that reflects the lifestyle of its inhabitants, focusing on the living room around a central chimney with views towards the horizon. It is an interior of organic curves, which emerge as a continuation of the surrounding nature. In the interior one enjoys a single space with only the prefabricated units separating the bedrooms from the day area. A big central sofa is built fixed in the living room so one has a constant relationship with nature, with the birds by the cliffs, with the changing light and colour of the sea.
Outside, the passer-by enjoys the scenery on the walk along the path laid by the authorities of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park and confuses this holiday house with nature itself, a hillock covered with grass where the surrounding landscape remains untouched with no visible boundary lines or designated garden area. The transparent glass wall, outlined only by a slim stainless steel trim acts as an extension of the inhabitant himself; it is like an eye that looks out to sea and life itself.
For the planning authorities, it would have been difficult to find arguments against planning permission for this house. From an aerial photo, this holiday house goes unnoticed in the landscape with the passing of time, just like the army shelter that had once inhabited the place.
Photographs: Future Systems
Captions for illustrations:
a. Jan Kaplicky (1937) and Amanda Levete (1955), founding architects of the architecture office Future Systems.
b. The house in Wales (1994-96) responds to the place and received an immediate approval from the local architects.
c. The entire house has a biological character, demonstrated equally in its structure, with the steel beam in the form of a ring, as in the laminated roof with an aerodynamic form.
d. The architects responded to the request with a house that was barely visible in the landscape.
e. The ground floor plan of the dwelling is very simple and with an ease that reflects the lifestyle of its inhabitants; a living room around a central chimney and views on to the horizon.
f. The glass front is like an additional eye that looks on to the sea and at life.
g+h+i. With the passing of time, the grass has managed to cover the building as if it were a bunker in the time of a war or a Romantic ruin.
HOUSE IN A PLUM GROVE (TOKYO), BY KAZUYO SEJIMA
A young couple with two children and a grandmother chose Kazyuo Sejima to be their architect. They valued her for being the author of works of architecture that was “light, clean and white, no bravado at all,” qualities that they thought would help to find the right tension between the privacy found in a dwelling and the public character of a house in a garden. “A shelter for the mind” and “a place to enjoy the blossoming plum trees in the garden”; these were the family’s wishes when they commissioned the house.
Questioning pre-established modes of divisions and hierarchies.
The copy-writer Miyako Maekita, and her husband who is an advertising film producer, had a small site in a neighbourhood close to Tokyo. It was a site of only 92.30 m2 where beautiful plum trees and wild flowers grew, which made it look like a real garden inside this residential area.
For a long time the couple had wanted to build their own house, a neutral house like a blank canvas with nothing to distract their way of living or raising their children. They rejected the idea that a house should represent economic power and attract attention. Their house had to be much more spiritual, a place for balancing the mind and relaxing the body. The dialogue between the clients and the architect never included the word ‘cosy’ or the outmoded phrase ‘home sweet home’. They were much more interested in building a house that would help them prepare their children to go out into the world. Sooner or later the children would leave the nest, so it did not make any sense making things so nice and cosy as to create nostalgia. When Sejima first asked Miyako what kind of a house they wanted, she told her: ‘Something like a temporary perch’.
The architect’s interest arose immediately. Kazyuo Sejima had studied architecture at Japan’s Women University, which had been created after the 2WW as a reaction to the Japanese laws prohibiting women access to state universities. Obviously, the origin of this university centre kindled an attitude of questioning pre-established norms and conventions that had been taken for granted throughout history. In the case of Sejima, observing people’s lifestyles, she questioned the validity of a conventional dwelling that consisted of a set number of bedrooms, a living room, a dining room and a kitchen. Fixed concepts were no longer valid in a rapidly changing society.
A house is “refuge for the mind“
The house appears as a white closed cube as it is located in one of the corners of the site. The door is fused with the wall, the doormat and a small cantilever being the only signs of its presence. Furthermore, instead of conventional windows, a few flat, square cuts are made on the exterior walls, without any seeming order. The logic comes from the inside. Refusing to create stereotyped rooms with a collection of arranged furniture, Kazuyo Sejima proposed to reduce each room to particular furniture or an action. For instance, the bedroom of the children is composed of one room-bed and a room-table. In that way, 17 different rooms were created, which together were arranged on a 77.68 m2 floor area and distributed on two floors with the tearoom on the roof.
Having such a small surface, it was used to its maximum. The structure of the house is built with steel sheets, which reduces the thickness of the external walls to 50 mm and the interior walls to 16 mm. In that way, the structure, walls and the floors merge together and each part appears to have the same weight.
Interpreting the idea of ‘a one room studio’, the architect connected the individual rooms. She made cuts in the internal walls of the adjoining rooms, and left them without any glass. This offered new possibilities. Some rooms look outside through another room’s window. The air flows freely through these openings from room to room, and the boy or his cat can enter or exit through these openings at will. No space is shut off completely. Consequently, offering such a choice of different actions, the idea of privacy turns elastic. The members of the family can choose their place according to their moods, wanting to be alone or with others.
This house links to Sejima’s research about the built contemporary house in our information society. For her, information society is mainly about not seeing. That is, the definition between spaces rather than marking boundaries. It is about creating transparencies in planning the house with non-transparent materials, as she did, for instance, in the daughter’s room where the feeling for depth is eliminated. Here, one can look into the next room through the opening in the steel wall, which is finished in such a way that it makes the room itself look flat, like a suspended image against the wall. When a passer-by walks by the window, suddenly the space between the window and the opening in the wall becomes real.
The house in a plum grove is more than a house in a garden. It is a new type of a house that speaks of how the intangible can form part of the project and design.
Captions for illustrations
a. Kazuyo Sejima (b. 1956) had studied architecture at Japan’s Women University, a university centre which questions pre-established norms and conventions. (Photography: SANAA)
b+c+d+e+f. House in a Plum Grove (2003). Plans, elevation and secction.
g. The children’s bedrooms is composed of one room-bed and a room-table (Photography: SANAA)
h. The structure of the house is built of steel panels, the interior walls being 16 mm thick and, the exterior walls 50 mm of which paint with thermal insulation is included. (Photography: SANAA)
i. The 17 little rooms in the house served as a form of experimentation and to gain a one unique interconnected space (Photography: SANAA)
VILLA BOLLEN IN HOLLAND, BY ONE ARCHITECTURE
It happened just over twenty years ago, the Bollen family had a parcel of land near Eindhoven and knew exactly what they wanted: to follow the fashion then in Holland and to build a French-style country house. But, as time passed, the family grew ever more dissatisfied with the house and even took to sleeping outside in the open air. The Bollens realised that what they needed was not a “style” house, but a house that intensified their relationship with nature.
A “style” house
The house that the Bollen family had built fulfilled every element of a French-style country house: the façade built in red-brick façade and the painted white, small-pane windows and garrets - all under a tiled roof. To prevent neighbours building an eyesore that would spoil this desired composition, the family began buying lots adjoining their garden until, eventually, their land joined up with a nearby nature reserve. It was then that the Bollens hired a landscape designer to lay out the garden. He played on the different qualities of the grounds – such as a slight slope and sandy soil - and created several perspectives, alternating free and ordered plantings laid out in a fan, none of which formed an axis with the house. As the family started feeling almost claustrophobic in their home, they found themselves spending more and more time in nature - almost without realising.
The Bollens decided that what the house needed was an extension that would open up to the garden. In 1997, they contacted the Dutch architecture firm, One Architecture. To inspire the design of the extension, One Architecture prepared a brochure of different houses by prestigious contemporary architects - many of whom will already be familiar to the readers of Stories of Houses such as Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Ben van Berkel and Alvaro Siza. The brochure also included historical figures that ranged from the classical Andrea Palladio to the modernist Mies van der Rohe. Although the Bollen family did not identify itself with any of the houses, it appreciated the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe because it seemed to embrace its entire surroundings. This was exactly the type of house that they wanted to learn from.
The history of the Farnsworth House
In 1945 Edith Farnsworth, a physician, approached the Museum of Modern Art in New York for advice on finding an architect to design her weekend country house. The names she was given were: Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. In the end, Dr. Farnsworth chose Rohe, and showed him the four hectares of land that she owned in Plano near Chicago, on a slope descending to the Fox River. The land was characterised by flat meadows broken up by a group of trees, including two enormous sugar maples. Furthermore, an important factor to bear in mind was that the land was regularly flooded, due to its low position in relation to the river.
The architect built a glazed box of 23.5 x 8.5 m, set on a floating steel structure and elevated 1.5 m above the ground on eight steel columns painted white. In order to respect the trees, the house was carefully placed among the sugar maples and oriented with its long axis in an east-west direction. The steel structure was placed directly in front of the glass façade so that nature and severe contrasts of the seasons were experienced with intensity, and formed part of the human environment equal to the built house itself. In this open space, the kitchen appeared as one piece of furniture - something that is recognized nowadays - and in that way enjoyed impressive views just as the living room did. Despite this "ideal" solution, Dr. Farnsworth took Mies to court, accusing him of overspending on the construction and describing how difficult it was to live in the house. However, despite a three-years fight, she lost the lawsuit.
From this point of view, it is ironic that the Bollen family chose a house that its original client had accused of being "inhuman". But, fifty years on, the role had been reversed. The atmosphere of the Farnsworth House was now seen as desirable, all because of its intense relationship with nature.
Matthijs Bouw, co-founder of One Architecture, interpreted the Fansworth House and took elements from Mies' work: the open plan, the border finishing of the roof, a replica of the chromium cruciform column from the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Expo of 1929 - even elevated the extension by half a metre so that the large scale of the open plan allowed the eye to pass through the building and traverse the entire depth of the garden and landscape. The façade’s stainless steel sliding doors create the effect that the extension is like a pavilion in nature where, from the inside, one can breathe the scent of the trees and feel the warm breeze stroking one's cheeks. Can one therefore talk of a style? Looking at this house, one realises that the architecture disappears: what matters is the closeness of nature.
Captions for illustrations
a. Matthijs Bouw (b. 1967), architect and cofounder of One Architecture.
b. After the lawsuit, Edith Fansworth sold her house to the young British millionaire Peter Palumbo who had commissioned Mies to design an office tower in the City of London, which would not, however, be built until after his death when the lease for the site would be available. When the time came, Palumbo applied for building licence but the project was rejected by the government headed by historical conservationists, a contradiction, as Mies formed part of history by then.
c. The sectret to building the extension to the Bollen House lay in One Architecture being able to reinterpret the Farnsworth House.
d+e. The Bollen House (1999).
f. At night, privacy is provided by curtains in strong colours that are designed by the artist Berend Strik. The fabric originated from Mr Bollen's own fabric factories in Asia.
g+h+i Developing the design for the extension, a few elements were borrowed that were characteristic of Mies’s work: the open plan, the border finishing of the roof, a replica of the chromium cruciform column from the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Expo of 1929 - even elevated the extension by half a metre above the garden.
MÖBIUS HOUSE IN AMSTERDAM, BY BEN VAN BERKEL
In 1993, a young couple commissioned the Dutch architect Ben van Berkel to design "a house that would be acknowledged as a reference for the renovation of the architectural language". It took the architect six years to fulfil his clients' wishes, creating a house based on the studies of a 19th-century German mathematician.
Curiously, the spatial concept of the new Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart - a radiant work by Ben van Berkel - demonstrates how the architect has drawn on and experimented with his memory of the Möbius House.
A new architectonic language
In addition to their wish for a new architectural language, the clients looked for an intense relationship with the landscape, as their two distinctive professions allowed them to work from home and therefore to spend more time with their children. The chosen site was amongst meadows and tall beech trees in Het Gooi, a residential area near Amsterdam.
Ben van Berkel understood that the new architectural language he was asked for should be a direct consequence of their new way of life. The idea of two people moving along their own routes, but sharing certain moments - possibly also reversing roles at certain points - was elaborated into the built object. The house had to knit together the different activities which each member of the family was involved in at different times into one structure: work, sleep, socialise and family life, as well as the need to be alone. Thus the notions of time and duration were important concepts right from the beginning, and ones which would later influence how the house and its objects would be perceived from different viewpoints.
Diagram of 24 hours of living
The scheme to convey these features was found in the Möbius band, a diagram studied by the astrologist and mathematician, August Ferdinand Möbius (1790-1868). By taking a rectangular strip of paper and marking its corners, A -superior- and B -inferior- in one side, and C -superior- and D -inferior- on the other, the Möbius band is constructed by twisting and joining corners A with D, and B with C. The result is a strip of twisted paper, joined to form a loop which produces a one-sided surface in a continuous curve. It is a figure-of-eight without left or right, beginning or end.
By giving the Möbius band a spatial quality, the architect has designed a house that integrates the programme seamlessly, both in terms of circulation and structure. Movement through this concrete loop traces the pattern of one's day activities. Arranged over in three levels, the loop includes two studies (one on either side of the house for the respective professions), three bedrooms, a meeting room and kitchen, storage and living room and a greenhouse on the top, all intertwined during a complex voyage in time.
With its low and elongated outlines, the house provides a link between the different features of its surroundings. By stretching the building's form in an extreme way and through an extensive use of glass walls, the house is able to incorporate aspects of the landscape. From inside the house, it is as if the inhabitant is taking a walk in the countryside.
The perception of movement is reinforced by the changing positions of the two main materials used for the house, glass and concrete, which overlap each other and switch places. As the loop turns inside out, the exterior concrete shell becomes interior furniture - such as tables and stairs - and the glass facades turn into inside partition walls.
The contortions and twists in the house go beyond the mathematical diagram. They refer to a movement that has moulded a new way of life as a consequence of using electronic devices at work. Ben van Berkel has managed to give an additional meaning to the diagram of the Möbius band, where its new symbolic value - characterised by the blurred limits between working and living - corresponds to the clients' way of life.
The house as an architectonic reference
The concept that generated the Möbius House did not expire with being built. Instead, it became further developed in the architect's mind and now, in the new Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, illustrates the history of cars.
With the aim of creating a museum that could be read as an urban space where the car is the protagonist, van Berkel drew three loops in section that were entwined in plan, just as if they were leaves on a tree. In doing so, he managed to achieve variations between the different levels, to challenge both the symmetry and the flatness of the floors, and to create a wide range of paths and shortcuts, such as those found in cities. The leaves of the tree are turned around a triangular void, producing six platforms which make up spaces of varying heights and creating a dynamic exhibition space.
Although the museum is on a much bigger scale than Möbius House, its spatial effect reminds one of the house. For the house, the Möbius strip suggested a plan that interlaced the different movements and activities of the family. For the museum, the trefoil offers a movement between forms of continuity and cross references, between open and closed spaces, which interweaves the different exhibitions organised by the museum. The visitor finds himself immersed in a continuous movement of shifting orientations and crossed viewpoints generated by the different notions of time that the museum recreates.
Captions for illustrations
a. Ben van Berkel (b. 1957), the founding architect of UN Studio, with Caroline Bos.
b. A representation of the Möbius band.
c. Diagram of 24 hours of living.
d. Working model. View from southwest.
e+f. Ground floor and first floor: 1. bedroom, 2. office, 3. entrance, 4. bathroom, 5. toilet, 6. ramp, 7. garage, 8. storage room, 9. meeting room, 10. kitchen, 11. porch, 12. living room, 13. chimney, 14. void.
g+h. As the loop turns inside out, the exterior concrete shell becomes interior furniture - such as tables and stairs - and the glass facades turn into inside partition walls. (Photographer: Christian Richters)
i. From inside the house, it is as if the inhabitant is taking a walk in the countryside. (Photographer: Christian Richters)
DICK’S HOUSE IN TROYES (FRANCE), BY JEAN NOUVEL
One of the first commissions that Jean Nouvel received can be traced to 1977, when a gynaecologist who was enthusiastic about architecture asked him to design his house. The client’s enthusiasm ensured that from the very beginning this would be an intriguing collaboration throughout the design process. The young architect responded positively to this request, intense conversations were had with the family about how the house might be.
Through dialogue a project emerged that everyone was happy with, yet unfortunately it did not obtain a building permission. The project was described by the local building authorities as a pastiche which did not integrate with the existing environment. Although the architect had to accept the imposed changes, he took advantage of the existing situation, creating the final image of the dwelling.
Towards a “critical architecture”
From his student’s years, Jean Nouvel was convinced that one could only practice architecture by following a personal commitment. He had taken an active part in the students’ revolts of May ’68. He was also instrumental in the outburst at École des Beaux-Arts, where young architects demanded a redefinition of the profession, celebrating a dialogue with the user and encouraging a democratic process when developing a project. In that way, the students questioned the type of architecture that was being made and what it could turn into. In this context Nouvel’s position was clear: to look for freedom away from the architectural discipline and to adopt an attitude of being sceptical and questioning; to listen and to make use of contradictions and characters of every situation and place.
To obtain this freedom, Nouvel’s critical dimension of architecture could not limit itself to theoretical texts or paper architecture. It was necessary to support his polemic position concerning themes related to architecture and the city by going as far as to wish for a change within the majority of the laws that regulated the building construction. Nouvel was one of the founding members of Mars 76 and the Architecture Union in 1976. Furthermore, he organised an unofficial architecture competition for the redevelopment of the Le Halles neighbourhood.
Nouvel with his partners, published manifestos, turned to the street on various occasions, fought against the narrow corporate nature of the profession, challenged zoning and the regulations concerning the occupation of the terrain which expressed technocratic vision which was short of humanism in terms of urban planning. Nouvel’s militant activity has always involved fighting against any obsolete norms.
The construction of the house
This was the historical context in which Mr Dick commissioned Nouvel to design his house.
The site was in the medieval city, Troyes, located in the Champagne region of France, South East of Paris. The city is now a famous tourist attraction where its narrow pedestrian streets are lined with half-timber framed houses. Troyes is also known as the holy town of stained glass, which adorn the 10 churches in the city centre, as well as containing the most ancient civil building in France that still remains devoted to wine.
The collaboration between Dr. Dick, his family and Jean Nouvel was intense. They spent long evenings defining the most suitable living spaces for the different members of the family. They decided to give the main living spaces one volume, which, according to a logical programme, included a number of vaults. In this way, the ample living room was located under a white painted barrel vault but also, the architect created a spacious play area for the children where each one had a small apse that was intended as a warm and secure bedroom.
Submitting the result of their conversations to the department of administration, the office denied the project a building licence on the grounds that the design was a pastiche of Byzantine architecture, thought to be out of context with the medieval city of Troyes. The report was demoralising and accused the house of not integrating with the environment, an environment which according to Nouvel “consisted of a disorderly mixture of neo-regional copies and apple green supermarkets.”
The architect complained to the town hall, he wrote to the president of the regional committee, and even to the minister of housing, but to no avail. Worn-out of fighting, Nouvel had no choice but to introduce the changes and additions requested for the facade, although he made no modifications in the interior.
Throughout this endless process, Nouvel took every available opportunity to make his cultural position explicit. He applied again for the building licence presenting plans that were so brief that they managed to confuse the administration. The project was accepted and the building work started. He took advantage of their confusion, creating a final external image for the house which incorporated the footprints of censorship within the building facade. Nouvel marked this episode of the censorship and deadly norms with a line of red bricks that traced the changes he was forced to make on the facades. As well as being a new home for the Dick family, it proved to be a statement of a personal definition for the architect and of the client, in refuting any questions of style or norms, pleading for an architecture that was rooted in cultural values and a dialogue.
Photographs: Nouvel Atelier
a. “The task of architects is precisely to create a cultural definition of the built environment.” Jean Nouvel Jean Nouvel (b. 1945). (Photograph: Gaston).
b. Dick’s house (Troyes, 1978) was the first project realised by Nouvel that could be called “critical architecture.”
c+d. The intense conversations between the architect and the doctor brought about the project that the client wished for but did not obtain a necessary building permission.
e. With the client’s help, the dwelling spaces were defined and adjusted to meet the different requirements of all members of the family.
f+g+h. Although the architect had to accede to the imposed changes, he took advantage of the situation in order to create the final image of the house and to leave footprints of the censorship on its facades.
i. A line of red visible bricks traces all the footprints of the censorship and the obsolete regulation which it stands for.
HOUSE IN LA MORALEJA (MADRID), BY MIGUEL FISAC
It was at the beginning of the 1970’s when the engineer Pascual de Juan Zurita decided to build a house in a wood of oak trees close to the airport of Barajas North of Madrid. He chose the architect Miguel Fisac, who was then well known for his many patents, more than a hundred newspaper articles, numerous lectures, and had already built a substantial amount of work.
Despite the modest commission, the client managed to persuade the famous architect. Fisac accepted with the condition that he could respect the oak trees to the maximum and could take this opportunity to research further with his inventions and with the engineer’s knowledge about the use of the concrete.
The development of the architect
It is difficult to understand the powerful expression behind Fisac’s work without making reference to his life. Within that context, it seems paradoxical that in the many texts written about him on the occasion when he won the National Prize for Architecture (2003) or when he had received the Golden Medal for Architecture in 1994, no reference was made to the close relationship between the evolution of his work and of him as a person.
From a very early age, Miguel Fisac had undertaken a search for personal references. He combined his architecture studies, which were interrupted by the Civil War, with a deep search into the Christian Spirit. At that moment architecture mainly emerged as a question of monumental styles that mourned the Spanish Empire. When in 1942 Fisac graduated from the School of Architecture in Madrid, he told us that “as we were only ten who graduated, there was a lot to be done. A month later I was commissioned a work and I plunged in without thinking.” Already in his first project, to transform a lecture theatre into a chapel dedicated to the Holy Spirit, Fisac started his experimental research. Very soon he gained experience from the huge amount of work he had, “because there was nothing”, putting into practice his innumerable inventions: Fisac’s brick, his first patent from 1951, which managed with its inclination to hide the joint to the next one in order to seal and isolate more efficiently, his window systems, the concrete “bones” (structure), the stands for lamps and furniture and the flexible moulds made of plastic and rope that gave the concrete a soft aspect. The 1950’s was a period of intense activity which came to revolutionise the facets of the Spanish churches, until in 1955 when he left Opus Dei. That same year Fisac started his journey alone around the world. It was as if he was embarking upon a new search for references, visiting many works of architecture. Disappointed by the purist vision of the Modern Movement, which Fisac criticised as being “inhuman rationalism”, it was in this journey that he discovered Asplund’s work and Japanese architecture.
By continuously rethinking, Fisac formulated a methodology of how to start a project. With the questions: What for? Where? How? as well as an “I don’t know what”, he started a series of reflections which had to be responded to in order to achieve a work of architecture.
A mental itinerary for designing the project
What for? The brief asked for a house for a couple with seven children and Pascual’s mother.
Where? Before drawing or deciding on building materials for the house in Moraleja, it was important to study the wood of oaks that grew on the 2600 m2 site. It was a site, which also at the time of the commission, was affected by busy air traffic from the airport of Barajas that passed directly over the land.
How? Fisac drew the plan of the house respecting the beautiful oaks. From the entrance hall, one is led into a big common space, which is without any partition walls but organised by the soft curves of the facade. It consists of a living room and an area for conversations and listening to music by the chimney, both with a view to the south. At the other end, with a view to the north towards Guadarrama, there is the area to play bridge and the dining hall. From here one has a direct access to the nucleus of the kitchen, a laundry and an ironing room, the servant’s bedroom and a patio, which has an independent entrance and includes the laundry line. Privacy for the office and the family’s bedrooms was achieved by a covered patio. Due to the inclination of the site, the access to the basement is also at ground level. Here the garage, the chauffeur’s bedroom, a play area for the children, and changing rooms for the swimming pool were arranged.
To enclose these spaces, Fisac made use of one of his inventions which enlisted the flexible qualities of the concrete. In the house in La Moraleja, white concrete was poured into flexible plastic moulds in order to transmit the quality of the paste and weight of the concrete, leaving its tactile appearance soft and spongy. Additionally, these concrete panels were especially designed so as to incorporate double-glazed windows that were fastened with neopreno and thus they would be sound proof against the noise of the flying aeroplanes.
“I don’t know what”. Despite the reconstruction after the fire in the house in 1997 and the recent alterations which the new owners did without consulting the architect, the house maintains the powerful plastic qualities of the concrete and the technical solutions of air tightness. Different tones of greens and browns from the oak trees draw out forms and textures changing with the rays of the sun and project onto the cedar walls and openings as well as onto the white concrete walls. What Miguel Fisac designed for the enjoyment of the family was “a fraction of humanised air.”
Photographs: Studio Miguel Fisac.
Captions:
a. Miguel Fisac (1913-2006) received Golden Medal of Architecture (1994) and Spanish National Prize for Architecture (2003).Working on the article, we visited the architect on various occasions to his house, Cerro del Aire. During these conversations, at the age of 90 yet with a very lucid mind, Fisac explained this work to us by making reference to his lifestory.
b. The exterior of the house is clad with prefabricated pieces of white concrete from flexible moulds, according the patent of the architect, with ventilation openings and walls finished with cedar wood.
c. Ground floor of the house in La Moraleja (1973).
d. The technical solutions have led to the formal solutions of the house.
e+f. The padded aspect of the concrete is one of the unique possibilities that the material offers:”When the concrete has nothing which disturbs it, what form will it take? It is the only material which is poured soft into a mould. Well, it should leave some traces of it having once been soft.”
VILLA EILA IN GUINEA, BY HEIKKINEN + KOMONEN
Eila Kivekäs, a Finnish anthropologist and a founder of a development association in West Africa, commissioned the architects Heikkenen + Komonen to design her house in Guinea. The selection of a Finnish studio was not that surprising, what was surprising was that she chose a practice renowned for its highly technological architecture. Markku Komonen y Mikko Heikkinen had gained an international recognition for sophisticated buildings that ranged from the MacDonald in Helsinki, the airport terminal in Rovaniemi to the Finnish Embassy in Washington. Despite this vast cultural difference between the work of the architects and the reality of Guinea’s republic, the line of thought that the architects followed made Eila burst into tears when she saw her house finished.
Eila Kivekäs (1931-1999)
Eila Kivekäs 's life was intense right to the moment of her death in 1999 which happened when she was celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Non-Governmental Organisation she had set up to aid the development of Guinea. Her grandfather, a village shoemaker, had discovered a pair of factory-made shoes in a shop. So intrigued by the construction, he bought them and analysed in detail the manufacturing technique. His insight led to the establishment of Finland's footwear manufacturing industry. A hundred years later, his grand daughter used the wealth from this innovation to aid the development of Guinea, an impoverished country and a former colony where the expected average life expectancy was 40 years.
It was the Guinean scholar Alpha Diallo who aroused Eila's curiosities and interest for Africa. They met when the Finnish literature Society invited him to speak about his translation of the Finnish National epic Kaleval into Fula language. Unfortunately, Diallo died prematurely during his visit to Finland. Eila personally organised the return of his body to Guinea for the funeral. She travelled there and on her return organised various exhibitions on different themes on West African culture.
In 1989, impulse lead to her founding the development association Indigo based in the town of Mali. This was a town of a thousand inhabitants surrounded by the Futa Djalon Mountains in the North-East of the country. In respect for local tradition, Eila opted for Indigo to represent the spirit of the association - the traditional indigo dyeing of textiles, where men weaved the textiles and women dyed them. The role of the association was to elevate women's status and the development of professional training, to educate and co-operate with local people about health care, hygiene and nutritional information.
Villa Eila
The choice of the architects, Mikko Heikkenen and Markku Komonen was determined by their conscientious meeting of different cultural settings. Besides understanding their architecture, Eila knew the two architects personally from the early 1980's when they had shown incredible sensitivity in converting her grandfather's large house into a cultural centre. A few years later, when she became established in her field work in Africa, Eila asked them to design a small home with basic facilities that included two guest rooms. The site she had was situated on a slope facing west on the outskirts of Mali.
Working on the project, the architects felt obliged to become familiar with West African culture and climatic conditions before defining the design. They realised that in spite of poor economic conditions, there was already a great concern for protecting the environment and the promoting of local building methods. Although burning trees was widely used for making bricks and clearing land for cultivation, it was illegal in Guinea. It caused a great threat to the whole ecosystem. Furthermore, importation of materials and heavy transportation had to be kept to a minimum although, paradoxically, concrete and metal plates had, despite their expensive and bad thermo-technical properties, gained popularity and respect in many large population centres.
The most ecological material used by Komonen and Heikkinen was stabilised earth, or uncooked compact earth. The process consisted of adding 5% of cement to the earth as a bonding agent to reach an exact state of moisture and then the building blocks were pressed manually in order to construct walls. This local material benefited from the local skilled labour available almost everywhere and required no wood for burning and no need for electricity during the building process. The roof tiles of the dwelling, only 8 mm thick, were made from the same kind of mixture although reinforced with added fibreglass. Floors were covered with terracotta tiles made by local women skilled in pottery; the long eastern facade was constructed of traditionally woven bamboo while the western enclosure was terraced with stone-walls and planted with fruit trees and blooming bushes.
In the same way as Eila Kivekäs had become impressed with the land and people of Guinea, the architects were receptive to the characteristics of the site. All the rooms were organised as independent units with porches in between them that opened to the mountainous western horizon and unified with a roof plate parallel to the slope. Far from imposing post-industrial European values, this architecture of assimilation and crossbreeding, prevented any exclusion and used existing resources in order to preserve the culture and costumes of the place.
Villa Eila conveyed the importance of context, of using what was available in each place - in materials, skilled labour and the familiar. It showed how the knitting of materials and spaces, qualities and textures of each built element, transmitted a way of life and culture, so noble and foreign to our western conditions, so receptive that it generated a whole set of emotions.
Photographs: Heikkenen+Komonen
Captions:
a. Mikko Heikkenen (b. 1949) and Markku Komonen (b. 1945).
b+d. Under a roof plate parallel to the slope, the rooms of the house are arranged in different units with a cross ventilation.
c. Traditional skilled local labour made the stabilised earth.
e+f. The east facade acts as a veil made of interwoven bamboo which filters the morning sun.
g+h+i. The interior spaces of Villa Eila (1995) are as noble as the objectives of the Indigo association.
THE STRETTO HOUSE IN DALLAS, BY STEVEN HOLL
The Stretto House (1989 -1992) in Dallas, Texas, was designed by the American architect Steven Holl for clients who had an extraordinary art collection and a beautiful site. They did not impose any conditions onto the architect but told him; "you can do what you want." What was the respond to such a freedom?
Looking for a story of the house
Right from the beginning of the project, the Stretto House was ideal. To start with, one of the clients had been brought up in a house designed by the mythical figure, Frank Lloyd Wright which meant that the client had already inherited from his family a love for architecture. Furthermore, when Steven Holl visited the site on which he had to work, he found himself in a landscape characterised by a river that fed three ponds, each contained within small concrete walls over which water flowed, making a constant murmuring sound.
Talking to one of his students, who also had been a student of the prestigious Juilliard School of Music in New York, Holl asked if he knew any musical composition that was structured in parallel to the water that flowed on the site. The student told him about the "Stretto" form where one musical phrase overlapped another. It was then that the Music for strings, percussions and celesta written in 1936 by the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók came to their mind. This piece of music was divided into four parts and characterised by overlapping percussions (heavy) and string instruments (light). Powerful flows of rhythmical divisions and irregular tensions made time seem to stand still or to rush forward with irresistible momentum.
It took the architect six months to come up with a sketch to a house which was structured around this four-part musical composition. The challenge came in maintaining and materialising in the construction of the house as an idea of an aqueous space.
The music of the Stretto House
Steven Holl admired the connections between the traditional and the modern in Bartók's music. Similarly, as Bartok's extraordinary compositions reverberated original melodies, the Stretto house built an aqueous space with traditional materials, its polished concrete blocks and metal structure forming part of Texas's vernacular architecture. These traditional materials were used in all four sections of the house, each of which is divided into two units: the first is rectangular heavy masonry which makes reference to the concrete dams on the site, and the second is of light and curvilinear metal which covers the various rooms - living room, art storage room, office, dining room and breakfast corner. Each of the rectangular masonry contains a service zone for the house - the staircases that lead to a bedroom and a sitting room, bathrooms, library and the kitchen. The last section of the house is a partially covered pond, a flooded room.
The approach to the house via a driveway bridging the stream gives access to a stone courtyard with a fountain. Immediately upon arrival at the house, the overlapping of spaces occurring in the house is revealed. If the plan is orthogonal, the section is curvilinear. In the guesthouse this interplay of straight and curved was reversed, similar to the inversions of the subject in the first movement of the Bartók's Music.
The "Stretto" form enabled Steven Holl to divide the space in such a way that each part was important for the next. The flow of the space evolved in different ways: the floor surface overlaps the next level, the roof overlaps walls and the curvilinear walls pull the daylight down into the interior space. The water - which flows over the dams and seems to symbolize the overlapping of the Stretto form - also takes part in this game, as it serves to reflect in the landscape the overlapping taking place in the interior space of the house.
In the Stretto house Steven Holl appeals to the senses and plays upon artistic perception and understanding of the site. It is the pleasure of experimenting architecture with spatial and light sequences, textures, smells, and sounds.
Photos: Paul Warchol
a. Steven Holl (b. 1947) architect.
b. Stretto is an Italian term which, in a musical context, talks about the emotional tension that is intensified by means of an overlapping of instruments. Music for strings, percussions, and celesta by Béla Bartók (1881 -1945).
c+d. Drawings of Stretto house; a work that received the Honorary National Prize (1993) from the Institute of American Architects.
e. Plan of Stretto House's ground floor: 1. Terrace, 2. Garage, 3. Entry, 4. Living room, 5. Art storage room, 6. Library, 7. Study, 8. Dining room, 9. Breakfast area, 10. Kitchen, 11. Garden, 12. Pool, 13. Flooded room.
f. Formula for music and architecture interpreted by Steven Holl: Material x sound/time = material x light/space.
g. The model shows the relationship between the house, the dams and the guesthouse.
h. Steven Holl was nominated by the Time Magazine as the best American architect "for buildings that satisfy the mind as well as the eye”.
i. Influence from the music is found in the furniture. Woollen carpets were designed with musical scores and float on the glossy black terrazzo floors.
THE ICON HOUSE (MONTREUIL), BY PÉRIPHÉRIQUES
Not only promoters and private clients question architects’ abilities to design economic, yet high quality, houses. The young Paris based architecture office, Périphériques, have researched into the idea of the model house and produced the Icon House, which aims to satisfy the expectations of both the client and the architect.
Although originally the house was born without a client - in fact, its source is based on the collective idea we all have of what a house is: a construction of four walls with 45º sloping roof - the model is able to offer different to versions that meet our personal characteristics.
36 Proposals for a Home
Périphériques decided to share their investigation with other young European architects. They asked almost forty teams to submit a project for a model house, of 80 square metres with a budget not exceeding 80.000 Euros, including the salaries of the architects. The end result was an exhibition, 36 Proposals for a Home, held at the Arc en Rêve Centre d'Architecture Bordeaux in the autumn of 1997. Each one of these 36 projects proved that it was possible to propose interesting schemes with a low budget. Many of them managed it by diverting standard contemporary materials from their original industrial purposes and using them for domestic designs.
The group Périphériques insisted on the very important role the exhibition would have as a pedagogical experience for the general public. It travelled from Bordeaux to Barcelona, Glasgow and Paris, Besancon and Marseille, art centres and home architecture shows. Additionally, it was accompanied by an illustrative catalogue of which more than 10.000 copies were sold. Nowadays it is very hard to obtain one. Consequently, the investigation became known to a large audience who responded with hundreds of letters together with several commissions. Now, the exhibition forms part of the historical architecture collection at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Your House Now
Five years on from the exhibition the group Périphériques published Your House Now, a second book which illustrated 12 of the projects now built as homes and indicated where one could find The Icon House by Louis Paillard and Anne-Françoise Jumeau.
The architects made the icon of a single-family house their starting point and used that preconceived image as a building component. Following this symbol, the house could be wrapped with wood, mortar, wire mesh, polycarbonate or whatever other material, depending on the budget and the taste of the clients. Moreover, avoiding the presence of elements like drainpipes, chimneys, balconies, or the dividing line between the facades and roof was a way of transforming a normal house into a surreal dream that retained its icon.
The interior of this volume was determined by the maximum width of a 6 metres beam which allowed an economical unsupported span. In that way the structure became a shell that permitted flexibility in the interior to arrange the rooms. This was something which was already implicit in the exhibition where five versions of the interior layout for the Icon House were presented with the aim to encourage future inhabitants to personalise their spaces.
When the catalogue of the exhibition reached the hands of Véronique Decker and Emmanuele Derid, a couple highly involved in politics and consequently with a great capacity to negotiate, they decided to interview several of the architecture offices that had participated, with the aim of selecting designers for their new house. After series of meetings they chose the Icon House because, although it was a project for a “normal house”, it was not totally pre-determined. Furthermore, their relationship with the architects, already stated in the commission contract, was based on negotiation following the rules created by the icon.
The family had a 522 square metres land in a working-class district in Montreuil, a town 5 minutes east of Paris. The conditions were nothing out of the ordinary. Their needs matched those of many other families: a big living room, five bedrooms, a kitchen, a study and a bathroom, all surrounded by a garden, as big as possible, and with a garage.
They talked about the skin of house and the feelings they had about the wood. As if it was about building these conversations, the garden facade was built of phenolic wooden panels with diamond imprints which reproduced the wire mesh pattern that covered the rest of the house.
A big garden over the house
These claddings and plants that cover and climb the roof and the walls make up a big garden which covers the house, hides gutters, drainpipes and vents and they transform it into a huge mystery. Inside the house, this same feeling appears in several details such as where plants cover small openings and where there is no need for curtains, or in the appearance of monumentality that is bestowed on the depth of the window frames and of the doors which exceed the thickness of the wall reaching the exterior space right to the metal mesh.
Although Périphériques designed the Icon House by responding to the question of collective memory - introducing the restrictive economic factor that affects the choice of cladding materials and the distribution of space - the final result responds to our particular icon of how one lives.
Captions for illustrations:
A. Louis Paillard (b. 1960) and Anne-Françoise Jumeau (b. 1962), members of the architectural group Périphériques, founded with Emmanuelle Marin and David Trottin in 1996.
B. The claddings and plants create a big garden that covers the house and transforms it into a huge mystery.
C. As well as exceeding the thickness of the wall, the depth of the window frames and of the doors reaches the exterior space right to the metal mesh.
D. The garden facade was built of wooden panels with diamond imprints which reproduce the wire mesh pattern that covers the rest of the house.
E. The Icon House (2002) is one of the many variations of the project presented in the exhibition 36 Proposals for a Home.
F. The clients had wished for a big living room and a kitchen downstairs, which were connected to the bedrooms overlooking the garden in the back with a combination staircase/furniture in wood.
THE HOUSE OF THE RAIN (SANTANDER), BY JUAN NAVARRO BALDEWEG
Returning from America, where he had spent five years researching art and architecture in the Institute of Technology Massachusetts (MIT), Juan Navarro Baldeweg received his first commission from his brother to design a weekend house in the hills of the Cantabria. The house is a manifestation of his conceptual investigations in America but, yet like a box of resonance, it needed an inhabitant to listen to it.
The materialisation of the investigations
Juan Navarro Baldeweg's brother wanted to enjoy family vacations in Alto de Hermosa in Liérganes. He had land which opened up to the green valley to the west, from where one could template the sea in the distance to the north. This project description would give the architect an opportunity to materialise his investigations from his broad conceptual education. Before becoming an architect, Juan had studied engraving at the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. This made him consider himself as much a painter as an architect. After finishing his PhD studies at the School of Architecture in Madrid in 1970, he left for MIT in Boston, USA. In 1977, he returned to the same School of Architecture in Madrid as a Professor of Design.
During his academic journey, Navarro Baldeweg reflected on and analysed certain essential forces in Nature - light, gravity, horizon, equilibrium, structures and the hand - which were realised in his different installations, paintings and later, architecture. The Slide from the exhibition Light and metals in Sala Vinçon in Barcelona in 1976 was, for instance, a game of equilibrium and instability, suspended in the air and ceasing the notion of time and space. Investigating further the field of perception, the installation boxes, Five Units of Light from 1974, construct and give shape to the trace of light in a natural environment. Applying this research, Baldeweg moved between sculpture, painting and architecture and aspired to experiencing space and the environment through relationships with human feeling and thinking.
The House of Rain
The House of Rain (1978-1982) draws its name from the climatic conditions that surround it. The stratification of building materials - stone, glass and zink - creates the impression that the rain transforms the house; dressing it, changing its textures and colours, resounding in it. This idea was already present in an installation in 1979, which formed part of the project. It was a small model made in copper of a house with a pitched roof and big gutters over which a coil sprayed fine rain. Appearing as if the water “combed” the house, the eye of the spectator sensed a relationship between the form, space and the different textures of the water left behind.
The design of the house acquired a U- shape with its two arms gently open as a gesture to embrace the valley. The link with the landscape was reinforced by separating the structure that holds the house from its enclosing walls, thus allowing a line of windows to run along the facades with the vision uninterrupted towards the horizon. Using architectural references, like interior perspectives by architect Baillie Scott (1865-1945) where windows were placed at eye level, Navarro Baldeweg also showed a commitment to functionalism and the poetics of space.
Tracing the road that surrounds the house, the visitor finds an entrance characterised by two blind and slightly curved walls. Instantly, the absence of a reference drawing out the horizon produces a certain feeling of oppression and makes the eye move and look for limits. At this point, the project anticipated that one would see three glass boxes, which were intended to organise and display overcoats, books and tableware, respectively. The glass boxes acted as mediators between the inhabitant and nature. Their slightly fan-shape layout composed the space and guided the visitor in his study of time to reach the infinite space by the horizon that was framed by a pergola situated in the garden. It was here that the eye could finally rest and contemplate the line of the horizon. But at moment of rain, this line would dissolve again and give way to a soft sound from the roof.
Through enlarging the scale of the first house in copper to make it into full scale architecture, Baldeweg introduced the notion of the client; his perception of entering a space and organising his belongings and memories within the landscape. Although the glass boxes were never built, the architect offered the possibility to fuse the daily life with the furniture, architecture and landscape. He imagined a house which acted as a resonant box. As he himself explained to us; "the instrument and the music are not the same thing. Nobody makes a musical instrument with the object itself. The experience of the architecture is like listening to music." When resounding, architecture encourages us to establish an agreement between the physical and the sensual. As such, the House of Rain is only fully perceived when inhabited.
Captions for illustrations:
a. The painter and architect, Juan Navarro Baldeweg (b. 1939). (Photographer: Pablo Fernández Lorenzo)
b+c. The House of Rain, installation. 1979.
d. A sketch of the House of Rain on a white background (1979). Pencil drawing, 30x40 cm.
e. Appearing as if the water “combed” the house, the eye of the spectator sensed a relationship between the form, space and the different textures of the water left behind.
f. Ground plan of the House of Rain (1978-1982).
g. View towards the north. (Photographer: Churtichaga, Estudio JNB)
h+i. The design of the house acquired a U-shape with its two arms gently open, as a gesture to embrace the valley.
FRANK GEHRY'S HOUSE IN CALIFORNIA
Before Frank Gehry acquired international prestige as the architect of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, he designed his own house in Santa Monica (1977 - 78). The story starts when his wife, Berta, bought a small pink bungalow in a bourgeois neighbourhood. Gehry decided to redesign what he considered "a dumb little house with charm", to build around it and try "to make it more important". The result was so emotive among their neighbours that the new house was even shot at one night!
The neighbours' prejudice
The architect wanted to make the little pink bungalow look more important than it was by following the guidelines of Marcel Duchamp. His work had changed people's attitude towards ordinary and everyday things when displaying them as works of art. Gehry made an extension to the ground floor which wrapped the little house on three sides. The old house appeared, in that way, as a familiar object within the new house. The exterior of the original house was left almost untouched, even when parts of it were inside the new house. Its interior was remodelled considerably. In some places, it was stripped to lath and framing. In other places, it was repaired or retained. When entering the house, the distinction between the new and the old was emphasised as one had to pass through two doors - one designed by Gehry followed by the original door to the bungalow.
"I was trying to build a lot of ideas," recognised Gehry when explaining his project. In those days, in the years when he was short of money, he was fascinated with cheap materials like chain link fencing, plywood and galvanised corrugated iron. Enclothing the old house seemed a good opportunity to experiment with the mass produced materials that were not ordinarily used in the building of houses.
It was then when the neighbours approached him to say "We don't like your house" - to which he replied, "What about the boat that you have in the backyard … or the van? This is all the same, the same aesthetics." But they said "No, no, that is very normal." Twenty-five years later Gehry is still fascinated by such contradiction: "Everybody hates the chain-link fence but nobody sees it. What they see is a tennis court and a tennis court is a symbol of wealth."
The evolution of the family
One night when Arthur Drexler, then the director of the Department of Architecture at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, was invited to dinner at Gehry´s house, he asked questions about whether the pealed paint on the walls was intentional or not. At the end of the evening, Berta confessed to her husband that the guest had "thought the house was a joke". At that moment Gehry knew that his research had been successful.
The aspect of the house, with blurred edges between old and new finishes, gives the appearance of being a continuous building process. "We are in a culture made up of fast food and advertising and throw-away and running for airplanes and catching cabs - frenetic. So, I think that those possibilities are more expressive of our culture than something finished."
When Berta and Gehry made the house, they had only one child. Later they had a second one. The children grew and they too soon needed their rooms be refurbished. There have been many later additions, like the small swimming pool that Gehry had started dreaming of or the conversion of the garage into a guesthouse for two daughters from his previous marriage who often visited.
With these recent renovations "I lost the old house!", Gehry acknowledges, when referring not to the bungalow but what had been the revamped house in 1978. His house, which is in continuous transformation, tries to catch up with the rapid evolution of a family.
Photos: Frank O. Gehry & Associates.
Captions for illustrations
a. Frank Gehry (b. 1929) architect.
b. Berta bought "a dumb little house with charm".
c. Model of a possible evolution of the backyard.
d. First floor (1978). 1-Living Area. 2-Dinning. 3- Kitchen. 4- Bedroom. 5-Garage.
e. Second floor (1978). 4-Bedroom. 6-Closet. 7-Master Bedroom. 8-Out Deck.
f. Kitchen window.
g+h. View of the entrance (1978): the aspect of the house gives the appearance of being a constant building process.
i. With the extension carried out in 1993, many considered that the house had lost part of its original raw character.
j+k+l. NEW IMAGES OF FRANK GEHRY'S HOUSE (Dec 06).
HOUSE IN CORRUBEDO (GALICIA), BY DAVID CHIPPERFIELD
To integrate a house with its built environment does not assume a superficial mimic of the geometric forms that surround it. This house incorporates them in its form by reinterpreting the notion of dwelling by the Atlantic Ocean.
An author of prestigious architecture in Europe, Asia and America, the British architect, David Chipperfield decided in 1996 to design his family holiday house in a small fishing village in the North of Spain. It was in Corrubedo, the same place the legendary Spanish architects Manuel Gallego and Alejandro de la Sota used to spend their vacations. It was a place in front of the wild sea and unique dunes that represented a complete contrast to their hectic urban life in London.
Corrubedo
Both Chipperfield and his Argentinean wife Evelyn Stern had long been attracted by Spain. During the 10 previous years they had rented an accommodation in this small village in the south of Coruña region. Corrubedo, with only 726 inhabitants attracted thousands of visitors every summer who savoured its fresh seafood, fished sea-bass and bream and enjoyed its national park with a huge mobile dune of extremely fine sand.
Looking for a site for sale, the couple at last found one, like a gash in the main street and only a few metres from the sea. Although this first line of houses that was built in the 60’s had the possibility to open up towards the sea and the other side towards the urban life of the main street, due to the forces inherent in the sea the houses demonstrated a typology which displayed a preference for the city. All of them open their windows and balconies towards the street, however, they felt the need to protect themselves from the sea and thus reduced the openings to mere vents.
Having his own family as the client, Chipperfield enjoyed an exceptional freedom. Yet, for him, much freedom impelled him to redefine the working rules: What was to be interpreted? Rather than being concerned with a style or a shape, it was more relevant to think about the architecture from the inside of the house. That is, to reflect on the human condition and personal relationships that determine architecture, the connection between the inhabitant and the experience of the building. From the beginning, as with all his design work, Chipperfield therefore focused on creating spaces which situated the individual in relation to simple domestic rituals – having breakfast, reading a book, cooking and contemplating the sea. The architecture would become a setting without attracting attention, yet its presence should be felt.
Absorbing the powers of the sea
The sea became the central element for interpretation; its power and attraction should be enjoyed to the utmost during the family’s vacation. Consequently, and to the contrary to its neighbouring houses, the interior spaces of the dwelling must focus towards the bay and the harbour, protecting its privacy from the main street with a practically closed facade.
The house is elevated in four levels. A few metres from the beach, a ramp leads from the rocks directly to the children’s bedroom, rooms that resemble ship cabins. Above this floor is the living room, located such that a glass wall affords views out across the sea. On the floor above are more bedrooms and on the top is a terrace which, protected by the study, protrudes towards the Atlantic ocean like it covets the very essence of the sea. Any enclosure which might obstruct the vision is dissolved on the roof terrace where the family prepares a barbeque as if on a deck of a boat.
The memory of the village lies in the life around the ocean. In this setting, it is the sea which is the element that comprises the link between the past and living in the present. This powerful natural force also determines the exterior of the house, the selection of materials and the layout of the interior spaces. The solidity of the stone, which forms the base of the house, is reinforced by the weightless glass on the next floor, a sense of lightness which becomes more intense until making the house evaporate on the roof terrace.
Further responding to the sea, the house by Chipperfield manages to integrate itself with the same neighbouring buildings that had protected themselves from it. The house maintains harmony with the heights, materials and colours of these houses in the main street but instead of repeating their geometrical forms, it incorporates them through irregular lines which respond to the ever changing surface of the water and which accompany the skyline of Corrubedo’s front. It is a project which is born from incorporating the reflection of the visitor, the architect and his family in showing the attitude of being “a part of and yet apart from” their environment. For Chipperfield it was not a matter of inventing new forms but forming a dialogue between the place and the newcomers.
Captions:
a. David Chipperfield, architect (b.1953) (Photography: Nick Knight)
b. The holiday house in Corrubedo (2002). It took four years to be built due to hard climate conditions. (Photography: Hélène Binet)
c. From the living room the awesome sea is observed, sometimes surprisingly gentle, which has attracted the attention of many poets, painters and artists. (Photography: Hélène Binet)
d+e. The Atlantic architecture, different from the Mediterranean, encloses itself in order to protect the inhabitant when the weather conditions are hostile.
f. The use of modern technologies like aluminium façade systems that incorporate a high performance thermal break and sealed joints allow one to open windows when faced with the extreme Atlantic climate. (Photography: Hélène Binet)
HOUSES IN THE SAN MATÍAS NEIGHBOURHOOD (GRANADA), BY JUAN DOMINGO SANTOS
In order to materialise architecture on the basis of operating by agreements, “an exhaustive knowledge about the life and belongings of the neighbour - to link with his private world -, is necessary.”
The work initiated in 1989 but has no fixed completion date. It started with the City Council showing interest in renovating a deteriorated neighbourhood in the centre of Granada known for prostitution, which led to Juan Domingo Santos receiving a commission to renovate one of the old brothels. Observing basic principles of community life, the architect sought to generate the project from the neighbours’ interests. By negotiating about parts of their dwellings, a game was established which allowed all members to enjoy spaces that they had been longing for.
Living in a community
The houses in the neighbourhood San Matías are known by its names or nicknames drawn from particular features or physical defects of the prostitutes who owned them (La Remedios, La Pepinica, La Cabezona). Domingo Santos was commissioned to work on a small patio house owned by the Cripple, located in the narrow street Calle Álvarez de Castro just 1, 15 metre wide, and next to houses owned by la Remedios, Carmela of the Dead and a tailor.
If one is able to ask the neighbours for a cup of sugar or pinch of salt, to water the plants or collect one’s mail while on vacation, Domingo Santos asked himself why not to go one step further and ask, in the same natural manner, if one could borrow part of their living room or some other spaces they were not using but which one felt really necessary for one’s needs.
Historically, against the common thought that dwellings are closed and isolated entities, the medieval city offered its houses the possibility to grow and adjust to the needs of the inhabitants. Asking permission to enter one’s house through a neighbour’s patio or share the laundry line became the rules for a game of exchange proposed by the architect and which received a great enthusiasm from the neighbours. They collaborated with a list of things they would like and what they had to offer in exchange. Legally supervised by lawyers and the architect, the base for this negotiation lay in the exchange of spaces and architectural elements without financial compensation being permitted. The result became an agreed construction that encouraged a communal feeling and traditional way of extending one’s house. As Domingo Santos stated, “it was allowed to build up or down, to the right or left. Any movement was possible if only there was an agreement.”
Establishing agreements for the houses.
In a letter written to us, Juan Domingo Santos meticulously described the intrinsic process for the exchange: The Cripple’s house, which was the catalyst for the whole procedure, had a small shed that was next to a patio. Adjacent to her, la Remedios lived in a house with a beautiful 19th century patio, with stone columns and wooden beams. To make her dream come true of owning this type of patio, the Cripple proposed to la Remedios to incorporate the patio to her house so she could use it as a walkway or a right of way. As an exchange, the Cripple would create in her new house a passageway next to the patio to benefit the house of la Remedios. It would be arranged in such a way that by uniting, they were connected to two streets at the edge of the block of houses, merely by crossing this passageway-patio space.
The solution was interesting for both parties, now that it made an elastic zone, which had up to then been very tight and difficult to access. Another agreement they came to, was to join the first two floors of each dwelling (very small) and to gain a larger floor space which could be rented out and thus, they could obtain an income that separately would have proved impossible. The benefits of this co-ownership were shared, depending on the degree of participation. Later, Carmela of the Dead, decided to participate in the exchange, after seeing the economic success and reward that these connections suggested for the houses (which enlarged substantially their surface through their patio). She offered her patio to form part of the passage which, in this case, connected to a square to which it faced. The result was very intriguing because the city, besides the movement through its streets, also possessed internal movements across its patios of different owners and, although being private, having the doors always open, any passer-by could make use of them.
To add to this exchange, the Cripple left part of her roof to become a sightseeing spot over the cathedral, which would benefit Carmela of the Dead, and she in turn freed a room with views towards the square for the Cripple. The result of all these changes permitted the Cripple, who originally had owned a small house, between neighbours and with a small patio without interests but with magnificent views over the cathedral, to finally share a traditional patio from 19th century Granada and one room with a view towards a square, with windows over other patios. La Remedios, in all this affair, also had a favourable result, the access to her patio had been improved, which up to then had been disconnected, and she had managed a change of ownership with Carmela of the Dead in a neighbouring house but closer to the centre, which she had been looking for.
“This game of exchanges and cessions has been left fractured partly because Granada’s town hall has bought the house of Carmela of the Dead to accommodate a few offices temporarily. As this occupation will be temporary, the Cripple, Carmela of the Dead, la Remedios and I are waiting for its removal to reinitiate this story. Disgracefully, Carmela of the Dead, paradoxes of life, was murdered by a client and let’s just see who is going to be the next owner whom we will approach to incorporate into the game,” said Domingo Santos.
This is an extraordinary project, which has emerged from the citizens’ conditions. Without a doubt, negotiation, as a concept, is already an architectural element. With it, new architecture is created which shows a special consideration towards its habitants, and refuses arrogant postures that have broadened the gap between society and architecture. In fact, as Juan Domingo Santos has confirmed to us, the expectations of San Matías neighbourhood have meant that many brothels have been bought and a change in profile in terms of inhabitants has begun to be felt in the recent years.
Captions:
a. Juan Domingo Santos (b. 1961) architect.
b. The project for