Site was strong, in despite of its flat and quite armony. Most of all because we were asked to respect the borgo typology but, at the same time, we had to project one-family house close but indipendent from others.
We decided to consider some of the functions of the houses like blocks of the borgo: kitchen, parents bedroom, children bedrooms, small apartment for grandparents.
We study a lot of different spatial solutions with models and we try to offer clients a house with some precise functions and vague space too.
Vague space in the middle, corresponding to day-time space, where to eat, to sit on the sofa, to watch tv, to receive friends and to play for children would be the core of the house. Night and service spaces would be around in closed volumes.
Staying in the central space, it is possibile to look forward the landscape in every direction. A double force – centrifugal and centripetal – works on this space: everyone comes here from any room, everyone goes from here to any room. It seems like a piazza, but very intimate because of its ramifications/declinations.
The whole volume is kept together by the roof, which surface moves up and down, quite the opposite with the plane of the site.
That’s the final result!
The client asked for a ground floor house. Programme was very traditional, but there was one exception: a room for him to listen to music. A very quite and isolated space where nobody goes except him. So we decided that would be the only place at first floor, better to concentration and introspection connected to music.
The house is surrounded by elements where inner and outside spaces are deliberately ambiguous: gelosie, pergole, terraces.
DATA
(Lebens)Raum is at Montecchio Emilia, Reggio Emilia, Italy.
Client is private.
Surface is about 350 sm.
Marcello Cova and Francesco Maracchioni collaborated with us.