Description

The precision of Campo Baeza’s designs is also reflected in his most recent work. Simple figures with precise dimensions are developed, and the contours and line patterns are carefully matched to each other. His Casa De Blas in a Madrid suburb interprets an ancient classical building type, the ‘temple on a hill’. Here the hill forms the basement storey for this house in board-marked reinforced concrete. It is a rectangular block in the dimensional ratio of 1:3, and the temple becomes the living room in the form of a steel pavilion on a level plateau, glazed all round. The base contains the entrance hall, kitchen, library, bedrooms and ancillary rooms as simple additions, with the served spaces facing the countryside and the servant spaces behind them. The building plot on sloping terrain affords a sweeping view of the countryside to the hills on the horizon, and makes Campo Baeza’s concept explicable. Here ‘living’ means contemplating nature and the living space itself extends into the far distance–almost boundlessly. The contrast between the solid, gruff base and the dematerialized structure above it with its refined, precise lines is also justified by the architect’s concept of light: the base has window apertures punched into it, and the pavilion walls are completely dissolved into glass. This leads to framed points of light on the one hand and linear-horizontal light on the other hand. A controlled view of the outside world and an open panorama go hand in hand with these stark lighting contrasts. The landscape is ‘shadow-framed’ by the architecture, and thus illuminated.

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Originally published in: Klaus-Peter Gast, Living Plans: New Concepts for Advanced Housing, Birkhäuser, 2005.