A Plinth in the Landscape
The ground floor workshops and garages of this farmhouse are set into the gradually sloping landscape, forming a plinth that the home itself sits on. This plinth is perpendicular to the street, dividing the site into a narrow service court to the west and a garden to the east, which is shared with the owners’s brother whose house is next door.
A narrow service court is screened by a wall to the west.
The building surrounds a tree, and a passageway under the house connects the service court, the entrance to the home, a submerged patio, and the shared garden. The front door opens to a vestibule with a lavatory, a place to sit and change ones shoes, and the stairwell, which serving as a liminal transition from the utilitarian spaces below to the domestic realm above.
"The longing for … and the impossibility of … return …"
The home is entered from an open-air passage beneath the building.
Layers in Time
The home will be built in installments by the journeyman himself and his relatives and friends in the village with limited financial and technical resources. For this reason, it is designed as a sequence of physical as well as temporal layers. The one-story concrete frame serves the immediate need for the storage of farming implements, a tractor, and recycled building materials. In addition to using a minimal volume of concrete and steel, the straightforward design of the regular bays and beams allows for the frame to be poured using an inexpensive, in-situ, scrap-wood formwork.
The first phase of construction is the concrete frame on which the home itself will sit.
The upper level is an independent, plastered block shed, the floor and roof of which are insulated. In time after the building is occupied, EPS foamboard will be added to the exterior walls. The windows are recycled from previous demolition jobs, while glass block walls around the central tree bring filtered light into the middle of the home
Details such as garage doors, pergolas, and the local stone cladding around the plinth at the front of the building will be added in time as resources allow.
The workshops, storage areas for farm and construction equipment, and bays for cars and tractors open onto the service court.