2010 archivos - Global Spaces

The Truffle

Jordi Costa — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 17:50:39 +0000

Architects: Ensamble Studio Photography: Roland Halbe Construction Period: 2010 Location: Costa da Morte, Spain

The Truffle is a piece of nature built with earth, full of air. A space within a stone that sits on the ground and blends with the territory. It camouflages, by emulating the processes of mineral formation in its structure, and integrates with the natural environment, complying with its laws. To build it, we made a hole in the ground, piling up on its perimeter the topsoil removed, and we obtained a retaining dike without mechanical consistency. Then, we materialized the air building a volume with hay bales and flooded the space between the earth and the built air to solidify it. The poured mass concrete wrapped the air and protected itself with the ground. Time passed and we removed the earth discovering an amorphous mass. The earth and the concrete exchanged their properties. The land provided the concrete with its texture and color, its form and its essence, and concrete gave the earth its strength and internal structure.

But what we had created was not yet architecture, we had fabricated a stone. We made a few cuts using quarry machinery to explore its core and discovered its mass inside built with hay, now compressed by the hydrostatic pressure exerted by concrete on the flimsy vegetable structure. To empty the interior, the calf Paulina arrived, and enjoyed the 50 m3 of the nicest food, from which she nourished for a year until she left her habitat, already as an adult and weighing 300 kilograms. She had eaten the interior volume, and space appeared for the first time, restoring the architectural condition of the truffle after having been a shelter for the animal and the vegetable mass for a long time.

Text provided by the architect.

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Passage House

Jordi Costa — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 06:24:16 +0000

Architects: TNA Photography: Daici Ano Construction Period: 2010 Location: Karuizawa, Japan

Delighting in its worldly views while seemingly defying gravity, this project seems to channel the spirit of Pierre Koenig’s or John Lautner’s seminal domestic work completed half a century ago, half the world away, on the US west coast. And yet here we are in the mountainous terrain of Karuizawa, Japan, a favoured summer getaway for city-dwellers.

Designed as a weekend retreat, Passage House is more aptly named than externally perceived. Although the building appears to be a C-shape in tenuous communication with a steep slope, its plan is a continuous circulatory loop, obscured and secured within the earth. Young Tokyo-based TNA has cemented its reputation for inventive one-off residences whose simple names – Stage House, Plaster House, Ring House convey something of their architecture’s rich reduction.

This project has truly stunning moments: the framing of nature; the trees streaking through the void; and the hillside steps’ finale, a magically folding-floor-cum-front-door. But their adherence to a diagram so abstracted from domesticity presents challenges. The programme’s unspooling round the circuit creates unusual adjacencies; for instance the bathroom, connecting kitchen and bedroom, has curious clear-glazed partitions. Furthermore, is the ‘free space’ between the bedroom and the guest room a loathsome lack of privacy or an invitation to intimacy?

Text provided by the architect.

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Atrium House

Jordi Costa — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 22:57:12 +0000

Architects: Tham & Vindegård Arkitekter Photography: Åke E:son Lindman Construction Period: 2010 Location: Gotland, Sweden

Atrium House is a vacation home for a family of three generations on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. It is built on a slight ridge that marks the former location of the coastline a thousand years ago. In relation to the open and expansive landscape, the building seems more like a low wall than a house. It is built around a completely enclosed atrium courtyard that is designed to serve as a fixed point, a sheltered outdoor room. The rest of the property is left undisturbed as a meadow where grazing sheep prevent the land from returning to forest.

The house is narrow, but its openings facing out are wide, giving the interior the character of a niche like shelter in the open space of the landscape. While the roof maintains a consistent elevation throughout the house, the interior floor rises and falls in accordance with the surrounding terrain. This means the height of the ceiling varies within the main spaces, which are arranged in a continuous ring around the atrium. Within this continuous space, the smaller rooms are assembled in a number of solid blocks.

Inspired by the impressive materiality of Gotland’s vernacular agricultural architecture, the masonry construction has a natural plaster colour that has been mixed with carbon black, exterior metal parts made of oxidised zinc, and oak doors as well as windows that have been treated with tar oil. The large sliding glass windows are mounted on the surface of the exterior walls, according to the same principle as many barn doors. Also the interior doors are surface‐mounted, allowing the walls to appear unbroken.

Text provided by the architect.

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