Description
Alberto Campo Baeza’s design for a house near Cádiz illustrates its occupants’ needs in an extreme and entirely consistent fashion. Although it is set in the open countryside, it formulates the client’s desire for seclusion, independence and contemplative calm very impressively. ‘Introverted living’ could not be better expressed, lending this building the character of a paradigm.
Campo Baeza chose a square ground plan for the windowless surrounding walls, which are three and a half metres high, implying framing, calming and protection. They form the boundary between the inside and outside worlds, and enclose an area divided into three equal parts, with the actual ‘house’ in the middle. Courtyards on both sides provide a staged transition to the house, which is placed higher, with its lower ancillary rooms opposite; they also have courtyards assigned to them. Double axial symmetry creates strict order, avoiding the labyrinthine quality that could result from mixing inside and outside up together. Four large, square glazed apertures of equal size, set in the house wall without joints or frames, create a continuous flow of space from courtyard to courtyard through the enclosed centre. Courtyard and house become one, interior and exterior flow into each other, emphasized by the threshold-free sandstone base and the homogeneous material quality of smoothly rendered white walls with meticulously precise edges.
The programme here was not just screening from the surroundings but also from Spain’s searing sun, remorselessly bright here. But of course natural light was not banished altogether: light becomes an instrument of the architecture. Light and shade with all the nuances of changing daylight on the reflector-like screening walls create light spaces encircling a shaded house. Sky, courtyard and house create a spatial symphony of a ‘perfect’ whole intent on harmony. The order of its geometry represents a kind of claim to be absolute, enhanced by four accurately positioned lime-trees, disturbed by a bathing pool on one side, symbolizing the source of life.
Drawings
Axonometric diagram: central living room with lower ancillary rooms and courtyards
Ground floor with central living room and courtyards on both sides
Cross section through courtyard-living room-courtyard
Design sketch of courtyard spaces, ‘flowing through’ living area
Photos
Exterior view of the access side
Courtyard with bathing pool and lime tree
Originally published in: Klaus-Peter Gast, Living Plans: New Concepts for Advanced Housing, Birkhäuser, 2005.