The trend for extreme cantilevers continues with this house in
Croatia by architect Idis Turato, where one floor dramatically overhangs the
other.
Nest and Cave House overlooks
the sea in the Opatija Riviera, where houses typically follow a vernacular
style with gabled profiles and clay roof tiles, butIdis Turato wanted to create a building with more of a
dominance over the hillside.
“The main question is how to
control the space encompassed; and subsequently how to develop selective
control of encompassed space,” Turato says, explaining his concept to frame
parts of the landscape using architecture.
The irregular angle of the
cantilever divides the two storeys of the house into two distinct
volumes. The ground floor is a rugged concrete building set into the lawn,
while the steel frame of the upper level is coated with white cladding panels
that help to create a lightweight structure.
An angled chimney acts as a
lightwell for a central staircase, which sits at the meeting point of the two
floors and connects living and dining rooms on the top floor with bedrooms
downstairs.
Here’s a project description
from architect Iva Marčetić:
Nest and Cave House
Idis Turato
Idis Turato
The hinterland of the Opatija
Riviera in Croatia is dotted with villas (built within a century and a half).
Their upper, front side reveals nothing but entrances beyond which we can only
imagine their spaciousness.
Their scale and relation to the
bay are entirely dependent on the seafront slope (perhaps, it is the tension
arising from the assumption of something hidden what gives the spatial frame of
Opatija’s hinterland its appeal).
Although the Nest and Cave
remains typologically and morphologically true to the surrounding space as a
whole, it develops its “hidden” side through the dialectics of domination over
and subordination to the landscape.
So, the house and the place it
renders are not structured solely by the slope onto which they are built (as it
is the case with most villas in Opatija). Instead, it actively constructs the
landscape and intertwines with it by laying down the ground level (landscape)
and by placing on it an upper object which hovers above as a displaced level.
Therefore, the house consists
of an entrenched concrete bunker (the sleeping area) on which a steel spatial
grid structure is placed and which elongates into a 17 meter long console.
Despite it being constructed
within a reductive registry of functions, with only two structural elements and
with its apparent division into the sleeping and living area, the house creates
a wondrous, ever shifting experience and interspaces.
This is achieved by a simple
dislocation of the upper segment in relation to the lower one and by inscribing
it into the depth of the parcel.
The dislocated upper part and
its hypertrophic console express, by alternating the shadow and the hidden with
openness and hospitality, the quintessential tension of a Mediterranean house:
the battle of the sun and the shadow. The Nest and Cave house becomes a
reinterpretation of its heritage by achieving a full form via projecting the
object (the shadow) and opening the void in the body (landscape).
The console leaves behind a
shadow which (depending on the time of day) gives volume to the living area
(“the heart of the house”, as the author calls it) and, by alternating the
intersection of its axes (as much as the angle of the sun will allow it), it
shifts around thus constantly creating yet another intimate area of the house.
Through its fenestration facing
away from the road and surrounding structures and by carefully framing the
landscape that penetrates and dictates the depth or flatness of the interior,
the visually (and statically) dominant white shape (the aluminum covered steel
grid) invites the Kvarner Bay inside.
Idis Turato, the architect,
having to face such a dominant landscape, attempts to explain his raison d’être
behind it in the words of Buckminster Fuller,: “(…) The main question is how to
control the space compassed; and subsequently how to develop selective control
of compassed space (…)” How to simultaneously capture broadness, enable
intimacy, while continuously standing on the edge in front of unobstructed
views?
The
object dominates over the landscape, while the landscape creates the
interiority of the object – a continuous interchange between the frame and what
is being framed, the house on the edge. Its strict geometry and sculptural
attributes (the architect’s control) provide a necessary foundation for a
future narrative (its alternations depending on the viewpoint). They also
maintain spatial relations just accurately enough to assure a possibility of an
unforeseen event (such as freedom in linearity of enfilade).
The view of the house and the
view from the house are in a constant clash of inclusion and exclusion. Beneath
someone’s nest and cave we are able to observe the sculptural relationship
between the landscape and the house (the other place).
On the other hand, when being
inside it, we become beneficiaries of witnessing the subliminal beauty enabled
by the controlled landscape frames – carefully planned axes and angles
successfully separate the “initial resources from the final product” *.
The control over a spatial
frame allows for “passionate uncertainties of thought”, regardless of whether
we are the observers or the users and of which story we are telling.
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