Levene House

Description

We try to answer the question of what are the parameters to build and inhabit in direct respect to a very concrete nature avoiding the generic tangentiality of the sustainable or the energetic. This takes place on a site in a forest of tall trees hundreds of years old with a steep slope that may not encourage much to occupy it.The answer is a system of symbiotic complicities between the untouchable qualities that nature offers us and what the municipal regulations allow, leaving the tree plantation to discover the possibilities of occupation and the way of living the emptiness left by its groupings, which we call "anti-forest".At each vertex, the surface found is provided with the heights permitted by the urban planning regulations, complying with the plans and thus generating a certain interval of slopes marked by the planning. This gives rise to a volume of faceted geometry adapted to the topographical, natural and urban conditions that encourages the resolution of an exciting housing programme in its interior.The relations of this geometry with the exterior make it possible to recognise a series of volumetric elements with their own consistency and useful landscape qualities that we call "specialised arms" and to which specific programmes can be associated with a particularised spatial resolution. The unevenness of the terrain determines the way of understanding the spatial and visual relations in the interior, with half-storey jumps that allow for a clear division into two autonomous dwellings with their corresponding programmes. On the highest floor, with a secondary independent access, we situate the children's temporary rooms in two arms, associated with a games room with an outdoor terrace in another two arms and separated from the access to the main dwelling and the car park in a fifth arm. The main dwelling follows a successive development of privacy as we descend in height, finding the lounge-bar in one arm and on the floor immediately below a leisure programme with an indoor swimming pool occupying an arm associated with a kitchen-dining room and a large outdoor terrace covered by the overhang of the upper arm. On the top level, the father's bedroom occupies an arm under the living room and her bedroom occupies another arm under the bar terrace, linked by a shared toilet-shower block. Each specialised arm is qualified according to the privacy conditions of the programme it houses and is particularised by its geometry and the luminous influences and presence of the forest. Thus the skin that defines the broken volume is engraved in its stone or vitreous break-ups, transparencies, or opacities due to the influence of the properties of the trees on this strange object that has invaded the tranquillity of its territory. The continuous amber or blue resin floors, walls and ceilings allow the abstract presence of the forest to penetrate in a warm or cold way depending on the floor we are on.  Along the upper floors and down the staircase runs a broken plane of storage and lighting that shelters in its polycarbonated structure of iridescent gleams a great mass of small inhabitants, a reflection of the owner's collecting behaviour, who filter with their presence the dull exterior into a personal and non-transferable interior.(Description provided by No.Mad)