The Hemeroscopium House in Las Rozas, Madrid looks like a reincarnation of Mies' Farnsworth House in the form of a freeway interchange The space is defined by the structure, but not with the order, clarity and stability of Farnsworth House, but with a seemingly free form and visually unstable collage of a variety of exaggerated infrastructure scale component. A floor height steel girder joined to an enormous concrete I-section, stacked onto an inverted concrete channel. An inverted-V structure extends from the ground to suport the lap pool, itself a structural concrete channel closed at the ends with glass to form the water container, which cantilevers over the front yard. Beginning at with a mother beam at the bottom, the helical ensemble of oversized structures ends with a solid block of granite at the top, forming a counterweight to the delicate equilibrium of force and gravity. The result is sublime, as if the structures were caught in state of dynamic movement and frozen in time, the space observed in its precarious existence, formed only in this temporal standstill, willed by forces unknown. The lightness and openess of the space is emphasized by, if not a consequence of, the heaviness of the structures. The only wall infill material is glass, a material that denies it very own existence. The landscape is at once, allowed to flow into the domestic space and seperate from it.
The house is an exercise in reconsidering the conventional tripartite notion of a house, floor, wall and roof; it also subverts modernist ideas of structural clarity and stability and of the clear delineation between structure and infill. It does so not with the pastiche of postmodernist architecture, nor skirts the discourse with organic forms or regressive nostalgia. It is essentially the same as Farnsworth House, a domestic space defined by pure structure with unobstructed connection to the landscape. It is however, a grostesque version (in a Bakhtin-Rabalaian way), a satire, but no less beautiful.
architect/ensamble studio
No comments:
Post a Comment