Pérez House

Klaus-Peter Gast

Description

This home on a parcel within a linear new estate on the outskirts of town asserts it individuality among anonymous-formless neighbours not only through its reduced formal language, but also because of the way the sections are fitted together. Two cubes, an essentially square block on the ground floor and a long rectangular block with a tower at the end are stacked on top of each other in such a way that a long protuberance towards the entrance is carried only by a supporting wall. As soon as visitors enter from the street, this floating block signals rejection of traditional, random set-pieces and conventional construction–characteristic features of many buildings of the estate. But the sense of protruding and ‘reaching out’ to the gate in the street wall also guarantees protection from sun and rain: visitors are under cover all the way to the entrance underneath this guiding line.

The ground floor at ground level contains the area for living, cooking and eating, and opens up lavishly to both sides of the garden. In the long section above it are bedrooms, fitted together additively, and bathrooms with a spacious loggia in the middle, so that the functional divisions inside the house are unambiguously intelligible from the outside. Cellars provide a garage and the necessary ancillary rooms. At the end of the top floor a tower room above offers a wide-ranging view of the countryside. This raised section balances the long projection at the front. There is scarcely another design that demonstrates its functional separations so decisively in terms of the body of the building. The triple chord of its volumetric composition expresses a spatial hierarchy tersely to the outside world. The design characteristic of the façades is the motif of a slab folded in different directions as a frame into which the actual volume seems to have been thrust.