Description

The living space in this striking house relates to the view of a silhouetted church in a small village in northern Spain. But there is one highly unusual perspective involved: the living area is sunk into the ground, and from it the room opens up over its full length to a garden courtyard, walled storey-high, with the church outlined above it. It is as though the anonymous neighbouring buildings and the surrounding area have been blanked out; the view remains calmed within the firmly bounded frame provided by the precise white walls. The transparent glass wall to the courtyard can be made to disappear completely, moved aside as a staggered sliding door, so that living and sleeping –which is next door–can relate directly to the expanse of the garden courtyard. This means that the living space metamorphoses into an artificial ‘nature-space’, dependent on the weather’s conditions and moods.

A guest apartment is placed a suitable distance away at the opposite end. But the succinct quality of the building is evoked by the body above the actual living area: it is a pure prism, an almost windowless rectangular block. It is not just its sharp-edged outlines but above all its white neutrality that creates object character in these heterogeneous and random surroundings. The viewer’s eye is drawn and held by this abstract figure containing the access level, a continuous open-plan space with a sunken gap for the stairs and a sanitary area added on. This is a furniture restorer’s private exhibition and contemplation area, lit by daylight only from a continuous skylight that defines the space. The view into the interior and the defined, framed panorama thus become the theme of an impressive spatial contradiction.

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