Excerpt: In Albania House designed by OOIIO Arquitectura the program is distributed in three volumes: towards the west with a triangular floor, the living room; in the east with a square floor, kitchen and bedrooms; between both pieces we created an entrance hall similar to those “zagüanes”, welcome rooms coming also directly extracted from the local vernacular architecture.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by Architect] The OOIIO Architecture team is specialized over the years in the design and construction of unique homes, investigating different creative techniques to find originality, surprise, and awakening new sensations in the projects they carry out.
Applying the “paranoiac-critical” method used by Dali and other Surrealist artists, the OOIIO Architects Team look for references, and links, in the world of dreams, of the imagination, which they then shape and turn into reality through technique and constructive logic.
This is how that house design process started: after understanding the needs of the clients, site and regulations, the imagination was let fly in search of some poetic link that formed part of their lives and that they identified as something close and suggestive.
Thus we arrive at the famous La Mancha Mills, a traditional massive construction, which emerges strikingly in the landscape of this area as cylindrical, white and coarse volumes that play with the sunlight and the wind. Its simple shape and architecture are a combination of the vertical lines of the white cylinder with the diagonals of its characteristics blades and inclined roof.
Albania House wants to be an abstraction of all this. As Dali saw human faces on the rocks of the coast of his hometown Cadaques, OOIIO Architects wanted to suggest windmills in a contemporary single-family house. A house that resembles a mill, decomposed and recomposed again, completing a different figure. A game, an experiment, an application of artistic techniques in architecture to create a unique work, nothing standardized.
The rational part of the entire creative process was focused on solving the needs of customers always following principles of sustainability and efficiency, and fitting everything into a tight budget with simple materials and quick construction techniques. The program is distributed in three volumes: towards the west with a triangular floor, the living room; in the east with a square floor, kitchen and bedrooms; between both pieces, we created an entrance hall similar to those “zagüanes”, welcome rooms coming also directly extracted from the local vernacular architecture.
The plot is located on the outskirts of the city, in a quiet residential area just where the countryside meets the urban, in a place of La Mancha, Ciudad Real.
The most observant and dreaming walkers who find the house there will discover a new link to the imagination, a link to another local cultural reference, the facades of the house look like the faces of giants who look at us directly defiant behind the wall of the house.
So? … Are they mills, or giants?
Drawings
Images
