Garoza house 10.1
The second home is sometimes understood as a relaxing and idyllic counterpoint to the exhausting life in the city. However, others find in it an additive component for a system that includes elements of a wide range of intensities, which are taken as the necessary and exciting parts of the so-called “urban culture”. Within this complex system, Nature would represent the conscious materialization of a dream where it does not work as the opposition to the city, but as an expansion of records and experiences of its inhabitants involved.
Garoza House 10.1 is conceived as an industrialized, scalable and growing prototype, which is adapted to its users´ basic and specific requirements, and that is ready to become larger as do their needs and interests. This first phase has been designed around a large double - height interior space, that houses all the primary and daytime typical functions, such as living, cooking and eating. For the moment, corners, mezzanines and transition spaces become the places where to sleep, work and store, just beside the entrance and the bathroom. Outside the house, a non - proportional terrace has a double function, firstly as an observatory, but also as piece of the artificial landscape created by the house. This house doesn´t acquire a piece of land for gardening, nor aims to modify Nature at all, but leaves the ground untouched by letting its weight rest on a few legs, which show how softly and carefully it was planned to dialogue with a landscape, which is admired and confronted to the most contemporary aesthetics and technique.
Finishing materials, shape and openings distribution might change in forthcoming houses, while the idea of integration by contrast more than by mimesis will remain. Materials, because when using surfaces that are able to change due to the variable incidence of light and the absorption of winter leaden colors of the sky. The appearance of the house will always be unique and different: integrated by reaction rather than by camouflage. Shape, because it is the way to express how the house is interested in the landscape, showing where it wants to look at or which orientations it tends to protect from. Openings, because their size and location depend on the purpose, whether it is looking for light, sun, ventilation, shading or views, but not betraying from the outside, the content of the inside.
Building this house at specialized factories using 3m wide modules, which measure depends on the limitations for road transportation, and moving it to its specific location in one day, means that it is concerned about a “urban” technical quality - floor heating, home automation, advanced and sustainable installation systems -. There are other advantages such as avoiding certain constructive procedures that might be aggressive with the ground, trying the nature with its runoffs and biological cycles not to be interrupted due to the foundation of the house, controlling the costs, selecting the finishes between a wide range of options, and considering construction phases that whenever they appear, will not disturb any life routine since new modules are produced far away and assembled in one day.
Conceiving an object according to contemporary aesthetics and technology, and placing it into the Nature is a gesture which could be closer to art more than to the tradition of “building the house” as the classic method of appropriating the place. Rising from the ground and staring at the horizon, instead of breaking the ground and burying the roots in it. The appropriation of the place using the horizontal scenery of the view, instead of looking for the sublime connection between the earth and the sky. Dialogue against conquer. Perception of the elements as phenomenological experiences, instead of using architecture as a mean of protection against them. Its distinctly objetual nature sites this house in the culture of the latest products of affect, including the quality that generic but easy to customize production, until they become a personal reflection of its inhabitants. An exciting experience that includes both the old desire of the houses built in factories that architects have pursued from the modernity under the idea of an “installation” or “piece” that enriches contemporary art.
