18/12/2012

HOUSE ON MOUNTAINSIDE OVERLOOKED





































ARCHITECTURE   FRAN SILVESTRE ARQUITECTOS
PROJECT ARCHITECT  Fran Silvestre , Mª José Sáez
PROJECT TEAM    Pedro Vicente López López | Architectural Technician
                                 José Ángel Ruíz Millo | Architecture
                                 José Vicente Miguel López | Architecture    
                                 Fernando Usó Martín | Architecture
                                 Sara Sancho Ferreras | Architecture
INTERIOR DESIGN   ALFARO HOFMANN
CONTRACTOR   Cooperativa Montemayor
PHOTOGRAPHER  Fernando Alda   more photos
LOCATION    Ayora. Valencia
SITE AREA    477,06 m2
BUILT AREA    230,00 m2
BUILDING SERVICES  Sanitaryware Toilet and bidet | C52 Series, Catalano
                                        Wash-basins | Supercity, Sanico
                                        Sanitary Fittings Bathrooms | Talis S2, Hansgrohe
                                        Kitchen | Minta, Grohe
                                        Lighting Custom-sized linear fluorescent light (Studio2)
                                        Light Fittings  LS 990 Series, Jung
FINISHES  Paving  Interiors | Capri random paviers (large format)
                   Exteriors | Capri random paviers (large format)
                   Surfaces         Walls and ceilings | Plasterwork
                   Bathrooms | Capri stone panelling
                   Exteriors | Thermal insulation + white external render (Sate Vipal / Parex)
                   Paint  Matt plastic paint RAL 9010
METALWORK AND LOCKSMITHING    Interior  Internal and cupboard doors |
                                                                    White lacquered MDF RAL  9010 | (Carpintería Sergio)
                                                                    Exterior Lacquered open pore timber (Carpintería Sergio)
                                                                    Glazing  Climalit + Stadip safety glass






















EQUIPMENTS  Kitchen  White lacquered MDF RAL 9010
     (Carpintería Pedro Segura Landete)

The building is located in a landscape of unique beauty, the result of a natural and evident
growth. The mountain, topped by a castle, is covered by a blanket housing through a system of
aggregation by simple juxtaposition of pieces generated fragmented target tissue that adapts to
the topography.
 
The project proposes to integrate into the environment, respecting their strategies of adaptation
to the environment and materials away from the mimesis that would lead to misleading historicism,
and showing the time constructively to meet the requirements of the "new people." In this way the
house is conceived as a piece placed on the ground, joining in the gap. A piece built on the same
white lime, the same primacy of the massif on the opening, which takes the edge of the site to
have their holes and integrated into the fragmentation of the environment.
 
The indoor space is divided by the void that is the core of communication cut parallel disposition
of the mountain without touching it. On the ground floor are the garage and cellar, on a volume it
has two floors with four rooms. Two of them, the rooms at the intermediate level are open to the
private street, the other two on the upper level overlook above the houses opposite, the Valley of
Ayora. One of them, the study is opened in turn to the central double height, incorporating it into
their space. Across the gap, and on the mountain, are the areas facing the garden day
illuminated by light reflected on the south slope of the castle oxidized.


















1) How would you describe this building and its features?
The house is located against a stunning natural backdrop. Crowned by a castle, the
mountainside has a cloak of individual houses juxtaposed together to weave a fragmented broken white fabric adapted to the singular topography.

2) What were the most importantant wishes/demands of the clients? (What kind of house did they
wish for?)
The main demand of the owners was that they want a privacy and very lighted house, likewise,
the adjusted budget than was available was a big handicap with which we considered at all times.

3) In which ways is the environment around the house taken into consideration? How does these
powerful surroundings "corresponde" whith the building? 
Conceived to fit into its surrounding environs, the project applied various strategies to adapt to
the environment and its materials. At the same time, it deliberately eschewed any attempt at
mimicry that might suggest a pretension to false historicism, instead respecting its constructive
contemporariness in responding to the demands of its “new dwellers”. The house is designed to
accommodate the uneven ground level. Built throughout using white lime, a sense of constructive
continuity reduces openings to a minimum expression, while at once making the most of the plot's
contours and conforming to the fragmentation of the environment.

4) Can you say something about what kind of atmosphere the house expresses (is it, for
instance, harmonic, 
The interior space revolves around the void of the communication core, arranged in parallel to
the mountain section, yet separate from it. The ground floor contains the garage and wine cellar,
above which are two floors with four rooms. The two rooms on the intermediate floor face a
private street, while the remaining two, on the top floor, look out over the Ayora valley, above the
level of the houses in front of it. One of the rooms, the study, also opens onto, and embraces, a
central double-height space. The day area is on the other side of the central void, looking onto
the mountain itself, and opening onto a garden bathed by the Southern sunlight which reflects on
the rust-coloured talus of the castle.

5) What were the main challenges of drawing/building this house?The main Challenge was to integrate into the environment, respecting their strategies of
adaptation to the environment and materials away from the mimesis that would lead to misleading
historicism, and showing the time constructively to meet the requirements of the "new people."
 
6) The residents are a family. The father is a historian and the mother is history professor.























 

LYCS Architecture Office




The new office of LYCS Architecture is a renovation design of a tower penthouse in downtown Hangzhou, with a panorama view of the West Lake World Heritage.
The original space with is an non-professional add-on storage room to the tower roof composed of elevator mechanical room, fire escape doors and slanted drainage surfaces. The idea of this design is to create the juxtaposition of this abandoned storage space and the new office, through the material homogeneity to heterogeneity and temporal attenuation of space.

In celebrating the collectiveness and parallelism of the authentic architecture language and the self-built “dialects”, the design remains the imprint of several original elements in revealing its original non-professional property. The eroded columns were kept in contrast to the white steel frame of the roof. The elevated floor from the original slanted drainage roof is perforated and covered with removable glasses, in making the original roof surface explicit yet in depth. The fire 

escape door canopies and the rough ceramic wall are kept to imply the mutation from the abandoned storage space into an introverted architecture office, further to amplify the existing transformation from an exterior roof into an interior space.
The steel frame and walls are painted in creating a museum-like white space, as an exhibitive gesture to the remainders. Unlike a pure delicate white room, the painted walls with the original layer of mosaic and cracked texture give a level of ambiguity upon the completely new walls. The juxtaposition of fading ceramic wall segments with blocking and opening doors and the new white walls creates another level of heterogeneity.  
The overlaying program of the heavy-industrial elevator mechanical room and the architecture office space attenuates time in creating its narratives. The broken orange roof door retired from its previous function as a guardian. It is moved thus respected as the interior door of the meeting room, in prolonging the lasting period of architectural elements and its space. 
The design attempts to create the dialectical effect of architecture professionalism as the program is, and the non-professionalism in architecture. It celebrates multi-signatures over single signature, which also reveals one of the design philosophies of LYCS Architecture.




















15/12/2012

House in Moreira / Phyd Arquitectura



The architect Paulo H. Durao’s house in Moreira
The house that Paulo H. Durao built in Moreira is a gem- a house where time stands
still.

Heidegger writes that for Aristotle “being” signifies “presence”, present. And following
on from this concept of being, the future is that “not-yet-being” while the past is that “no-
longer-being”.

This quite radical house in Moreira by Paulo H. Durao is a house of present, past and
future. A house so radically beautiful that it is timeless, beyond time, capable of
detaining time.

There are houses, works whose spectacular characteristics immediately situate them
in the history of architects. They cause such a sensation that with the relentless
passage of time they soon become obsolete.  Will-o'-the-wisps, one-day wonders.  

Then there are other houses, other works that pass into the History of Architecture for
their rigor and depth, their truth and beauty. They are favored by the passage of time
and remain in the memory of the people. Like this house in Moreira.
















EXTRACTION MECHANISMS
The house, mysterious and hermetic, appears before us like an impressive closed
drawer of reinforced concrete. It looks like the embodiment of the advice given by
Berthold Lubetkin, the great Russian architect, who at the end of his life said that he
had made nothing more than concrete shoe-boxes.
Demonstrating great wisdom with this box, Paulo H. Durao has excavated the precise
incisions for light and air to enter in such a way that the space inside from the
excavation of the northeast corner to create the entrance, to the two fissures, like
patios, on the east façade, is quite taut.
And once the openings through which light penetrates and crosses the architectural
instrument have been pierced, the architects looks for and finds the mechanisms with
which this light makes the interior spaces of this box play like a musical instrument. And
when the light pours in, the box is converted into a “boîte à miracles”, as proposed by
Le Corbusier.
 FINE-TUNING MECHANISMS
Here the architect carried out exercises of proportion and disproportion, combining
compressed horizontal spaces with double-height vertical spaces conveniently crossed
by light, to produce effective diagonal spatial effects.
SERVANTS, SERVED
The canonical floor-plan is impeccable.  The band of servant elements to one side at
the back leaves the more ample served spaces to the other side, opening onto the
garden via the openings in the box, the patios.  The house is so well proportioned that
although small, it appears large. 
PREFACES
This is the third house after those in Pedrogao and Liteiros that Paulo H. Durao has
built. And while the previous two are splendid, this is perhaps the most radical: a
mature, masterly work, which puts the quality of the architect to the test and summarizes
so well the ideas of its author on architecture. A house that achieves its desired aim of
making time stand still. 
TIME
The architect, Paulo H. Durao, is about to present his doctoral thesis on Time in
Architecture at the UPM in Madrid, where he spent many years as professor in the
Architectural Projects Department. And this house can be seen as a logical
consequence of his doctoral thesis. As the materialization of many of the themes he
analyzes around Time in artistic creation.
Once again we are faced here with Architecture that springs from truth and is
developed with truth, and at whose hand beauty is achieved, as Plato proposed:
Beauty as the splendor of Truth, the dream of every creator. Radical beauty in this
radical house built in Moreira by Paulo H. Durao.






















Clients: Married couple with two children, one boy and one girl.

Site: Moreira, Maia, Portugal - 486 m² of schist and sands type soil, long and thin, in a
developing suburb area, surrounded by old and new constructions, mainly housing with
different scales, there is some agriculture presence.

Floor areas
First floor (Gross area): 132,50 m². Ground floor (Gross area): 139,00 m². Underground
floor (Gross area): 87,00 m².

Main bedroom with wc: 32,00 m². Boy bedroom with wc: 20,50 m². Girl bedroom with
wc: 23,50 m². Play area: 8,00 m².

Kitchen: 27,00 m². Living room: 40,00 m². Office with wc: 16,6 m².
Service wc and Laundering room: 8,00 m². Garage and Storage: 42 m².
Total circulation: 43,00 m². Garden: 286,50 m².
Exterior Patios: 37,50 m². Total area: 358,50 m².

Car parking: 2 places underground, 3 places in the street.

Structure
in situ poured Concrete solid “box”, insulation between the concrete structure and the
interior brick wall, resulting in a 40cm exterior wall.

Finishes
Externally, the concrete is apparent with a varnish finishing, stainless steel protections,
and natural aluminum windows. Internally, white-painted pladur, with natural wood on the
doors and baseboards. First floor with natural wood on the ground, except in the water
areas which are marble, as is the whole ground floor. Staircase has marble between
the underground and

ground floor and natural wood to de first floor, sustained by 1 cm tick solid steel rods
painted in white, as all the steel in the interior.

Mechanical: Solar powered, heated floor.

2007 – 2011

Authors – Phyd Arquitectura
Paulo Henrique Durão João Ricardo Dias Daniel Gil Tomé

Collaboration Jennifer Duarte Miguel Àguas

Structure
Eng. Pedro Fragoso Viegas

Photography
Javier Callejas