DESERT ROSE

 

Private villa in Kuwait City, new construction, 3600 sqm

Project by: Massimiliano Camoletto, Valter Camagna - UdA Architetti
Collaborators: Matteo Franco, Alberto La Porta, Luca Malavolta, Andrea Marchiolè, Nydia Urdaneta 
Interior design collaborators: Adelaide Testa, Tarso Endres
Building site management: Tarso Endres
Photographer: Matteo Franco

 

In a place where there is no nature as we understand it, surrounded as we are by greenery and a total absence of desert landscape, architecture itself is turning into NATURE. No fakes and no imitations, just sculpted and shaped by the wind and storms like a desert rose.

 

  

 

It is a house but also an oasis. It is a piece of cityscape in a place where the city has almost no urban form. It is a crystalline concretion, a geological feature that turns into landscape in place of vegetation. Each building is the re-composition of a myriad of different materials ripped out of the entrails of the Earth or its surface.

 

  

 

Here, more than ever before, marbles, stones and the very conformation of the structures and facades combine to re-evoke the eternal battle between man and the world's entropy, the desire to rearrange space and matter into something meaningful again. So, as a contrast between the intimacy of interior spaces and emphasis/power of masses, the echo from a primeval cave can be heard ringing around luxurious modern-day life.

 

    

 

Sometimes the contrast is only apparent, on other occasions it is openly avowed. Water is a type of material on a par with stone, marble can be more comfortable than fabric and what seems to be introversion or closure can reveal unsuspected openings and vanishing points for both the eye and spirit. Hyperreality and emptiness coexist.

              

 

Ground floor plan

 

 

First floor plan

 

 

Second floor plan

 

 

West elevation

 

 

South elevation

 

 

North elevation