Submitted by Berrin Chatzi Chousein

Architect’s dream

Turkey Architecture News - Dec 12, 2013 - 22:26   3893 views

Architect’s dream

Architect's dream

 

For his Solo Houses project, developer Christian Bourdais gave 10 architects carte blanche to create whatever they wanted. The results are as inventive as they are eccentric

by Matt and Albert

 

Sometimes you look at a modern house and think, “Wow, that’s amazing… I’m not sure I could live there though. All that concrete would be terribly chilly in the winter. And those open-tread stairs! Cripes, that’s a visit to A&E waiting to happen.” The chances are, however, that the owner doesn’t live there either. Such is the phenomenon of the architect-designed holiday home.

The great thing about a building designed for occasional use is that it can provide a deliberate contrast to a primary residence. Often it is consciously ascetic, a place for mental disentanglement. A few years ago we visited an exemplary holiday home on the coast of Belgium designed by John Pawson – in typical Pawson fashion, there is very little there, save for a few bits of modernist furniture and a ziggurat of mud on the wall by the artist Richard Long. But it acts as an architectural decompression chamber, a place of simplicity where the owners can catch their breath.

The great thing about a building designed for occasional use is that it can provide a deliberate contrast to a primary residence. Often it is consciously ascetic, a place for mental disentanglement.

At other times, holiday homes are focused on theatricality and experimentation. Take the Balancing Barn in Suffolk, for example, the gleaming flagship of Alain de Botton’sLiving Architecture venture. It looks like an aggrandised Airstream teetering on the edge of a cliff. You wouldn’t want to live there, but as a place to take a holiday it’s magnificent – challenging, thought-provoking and, most of all, good fun.

A newly planned collection of second homes in the Spanish canton of Matarranya takes such architectural conviviality to even greater extremes. A 50-hectare site approximately two hours south of Barcelona, in a national park, has been chosen as the canvas for 10 or so homes by designers from around the world. The only limit is budget, so the architects have been given free reign to go as utterly bonkers as they like.

Architect’s dream

View from Casa Pezo

The Solo Houses project is the brainchild of the French developer Christian Bourdais. All of the properties are for sale, and an open day is being held at the site on the 17th and 18th December. The first house to be built, Casa Solo Pezo by the Chilean architects Pezo von Ellrichshausen, has been snapped up already. A scrupulously symmetrical structure, it consists of an elevated sequence of rooms set around an open-air courtyard containing a swimming pool. “If you want to go through the centre, you have to get wet,” says Sofia von Ellrichshausen. She and her partner revelled in the creative freedom afforded by their client. “It’s impossible to make architecture with carte blanche, because there are always restrictions,” Mauricio Pezo explains, “but Christian’s intention is to respect your ideas. So we’re very engaged with the whole initiative. It’s trying to make a very solid contribution – in a humble way – to the current state of architecture.”

The most visually radical of the designs is Casa Solo Faustino, a 2,260 sq ft house by Didier Faustino. It hasn’t been built yet, but the CGIs conjure an image of a meteorite crashed into the side of a hill. Or is it an architectural asterisk? Its form – a series of extruded matchboxes – recalls Studio East Dining byCarmody Groarke, a temporary restaurant that popped up next to the Olympic site in Stratford in 2010. The wide aperture of each box frames a different cinematic view of the surrounding landscape.

Architect’s dream

Office Kersten Geers David van Severn glazed circular house

Casa Solo Mos, by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample, employs the matchbox silhouette in a more restrained manner, with rigorously right-angled forms stacked vertically on their haunches like meerkats straining for a better view. The idea is that the ordered geometry of the architecture will eventually be over-run by the natural march of the vegetation, creating the feeling of a timeless ruin.

Inspired by the tradition of summerhouses built in the middle of an idyllic landscape, the Los Angeles-based architects Johnston Marklee have plumped for a roundhouse that brings to mind John Lautner’s Chemosphere in their native city. Office Kersten Geers David van Severen have also designed a circular structure, albeit one that is far less monolithic. Hiding in the undergrowth like a modernist hula-hoop, it is almost apologetic in its visual lightness.

Anyone who saw Sou Fujimoto’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion this summer will recognise his eponymous villa, which is like a game of pick-up-sticks for grown-ups. It consists of tree trunks assembled in a latticework, allowing the breeze to blow through it and filtering the sunlight. As a home, of course, it would be completely hopeless. But as a holiday house, a folly of fun, a place to reconnect with nature… what could be better?

> via telegraph.co.uk