London Private House
Yes, you’d like that:
a mansion in the countryside, with a big terrace, in front of the beach and behind Friedrichstrasse, beautiful outlook, elegant and fine, from the bathroom window the view is alpine - but the movie theatre is just at a pass. The whole thing modest and unpretentious: nine bedrooms, or better make it ten! Oak trees on the roof garden over the den, radio, central heating, vacuum cleaner, Servants invisible in their demeanour, a sweet woman, lively and gorgeous - (and one for the weekend, just to chat) - a library and all around that perfect serenity and quiescence. In the shed two ponies, four thoroughbred stallions, eight cars, motocycles, all of them at your personal care – no kidding! And in your spare time you go hunting deer.
Kurt Tucholsky
Can an architect place his cards on the table and clearly speak about how his aim is, to achieve beauty?
What we strive to achieve is beauty, that beauty we so eagerly seek: in our lifes and in architecture. Guided by Plato and Saint Augustine who said that “beauty is the splendor of truth”, we aim for honesty and truthness in architecture. Beauty is not something superficial, vague or diffuse. It is something profound, precise and concrete that stirs the very foundations of man, that causes time to stand still.
The search for beauty coincides with the search for freedom. Searching in architecture for the freedom derived from the radicalism of indisputable reason in tune with our dreams always ends up in truth culminating in beauty. As the English poet Keats described so well in his Ode on a Grecian Urn: “beauty is truth,truth beauty, that is all”.
This work shows a new way of thinking and understanding a home, away from the closed building composed of many theme rooms, to create a large open space, glass, open and versatile. True and honest materials describe the building. Wodden boxes and a glass and concrete „Freiraum“. The open space can be seerated into fragments, which contain functions like a swimming pool, gunroom, or a cinema. The scale of the house can change, due to the flexibility of the open space construction.
