SUBURBAN CHALLENGE

 

 

DETACHED HOUSE IN THE COUNTRY SIDE OF TURIN – ITALY. SQM 420

 

Team di progettazione: Valter Camagna
Collaboratori: Luca Malavolta, Mauro Camagna, Shinobu Hashimoto

Structural engineering :Ing. Antonio Vallino

 
Fotografo: Alessandro Cane

 

    

 

The client required a contemporary project as he wanted a “modern” house that would combine the quietness and privacy of domestic life with transparency, permeability and volumetric rigour.

 

 

The house, the single-family home a domestic hearth, are nothing but elements of an actually broader plan. Ambitions, myths, hopes for a long-past modernity that was born from an age and a wave that started many years ago on the other side of the ocean and has now ended up on the shores of the Italian global village.

 

 

Even though the landscape has become isomorphic, there are nevertheless spaces to hide between the plies of reality.In a region where the most common type of construction results in semi-detached suburban houses, let the house be a simple volume suspended above the people's heads.

 

 

Life, its private dimension, the one that is kept hidden, is duly protected; outside, only the new marks of the landscape are to be seen. The ground floor and the garden are now about one metre lower than street level and kept separated from the street itself by a continuous wall two metres in height. From the outside only the first floor can be seen rising above the external wall. The ground floor comprising the living room/kitchen area is nearly all made up of glazed sections, and allows passage into the garden and further down towards the sequence of patios that are placed between the house and the wall running along the street.

Thus the living space is extended over the whole external area, including the garden and the patios. Privacy does not come from one single room, or a narrow isolated space: actually, it is the idea of the courtyard, of a broader enclosed space that creates it. The spatial folding and its presence in the landscape: the horizontal of the fields and plains and the widespread, residential one.

 

 

A black parallelepiped floating on the horizon with glimpses of the sky reflecting on the walls. A puzzling, mysterious presence, interference with reality, where the acts of seeing and being seen are the real substitutes for sheer ostentation or display.

 

      

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