The Advantages of Living on a Loop (first part)

CONVERSATION BETWEEN POWERHOUSE COMPANY, EKHI LOPETEGI AND ARQUITECTURA-G

Published at Apartamento Magazine #3

http://www.apartamentomagazine.com/

INTRO (ARQUITECTURA-G)

Our studio has recently been commissioned to transform a 16th-century traditional Basque house into two dwellings. When you face a project of this kind, more factors than usual come into play. You rarely deal with a tabula rasa, and some­times the context is the background; however, in cases like this, its presence is so powerful it becomes the co-star.When approaching an existent being which has worked in a cer­tain way, you have the mission of making it yours without making it disappear. You get into the game of appropriation of the space by removing, adding or plainly transforming. This game requires sometimes subtle acts, but occasionally the action can be drastic.

This is what Apartamento is about; no matter if it’s a flat, a penthouse or a garage. You paint a wall or you demolish it, transforming a space with a previous identity into something new, completely yours.

The Spiral House project by Powerhouse Company fits really well in this subject. It sets out a complex matter in a simple and clear way: a typical burgundy farmhouse, for example, set on a large terrain needs extension that will just about double the house.

We invited them to have a conversation alongside Ekhi Lopetegi, philosopher and musician, and Charles Bessard (office partner, along with Nanne de Ru) who joins us in this discussion.

This time we have decided to tackle our discussion with the film ‘Groundhog Day’. We see a relation between the movie and the space Spiral House creates. We could state that Bill Murray drives a loop, which takes place in the town and modifies the space by manipulating elements in a re­peating time…

ARQUITECTURA-G

We agreed in the previous conversations that architecture is something that mostly belongs to “time”. Not only in its gen­erative process but in the time for being understood, modified, assimilated, lived and demolished. In that way, Bill Murray prompts situations that change the space in a way that suits his tastes once he understands his new world, and, as a last resort, changes himself by self-improving.

 Being the Spiral House a suggestive act, neither a parasitic nor futile extension, it provokes a new understanding of the existing fabric; we don’t have only a house or a spiral, nor strictly the addition of the two, but something new, different.

We would like you to explain the physical and functional con­nection between the two bodies, as your website drafts don’t show it at all. Furthermore, we would like to know if, in your opinion, an extension can provoke in an immediate and aggres­sive form, a new way of understanding the space, or if it’s some­thing gradual, with two bodies converging over the time.

POWERHOUSE COMPANY

The Spiral House is a house extension that creates a link between the ground floor and the loft floor of an existing farmhouse. The existing building was organised according to a traditional 19th-century lifestyle with a strong spatial segregation between the two levels: the dining and hosting parts on the ground floor and the more intimate family area including the bedrooms and a study on the upper level, with a tight separation between the two. This reflects the rising bourgeoisie lifestyle of the 19th-century where the representational rooms like the living room and the dining room were completely separated from the daily rooms like the bedrooms and the kitchen. This polarisation of the domestic functions resulted in the familial life never meet­ing the social and representational life of the family.

By restricting the guest area to only a small part of the house it gave the guests the vague impression remaining in the ante­chamber of the house without really entering the family’s life. For this young family of winemakers who decided to live in a small typical burgundy village, inviting guests implied in most of cases an overnight stay and required more area.

The Spiral House extends the program of the existing house with a large living room joined with a study and a cigar/home-cinema corner, two guest rooms, a children guest room / play zone and an additional kid room. While the existing house dedi­cated 80% of the area to the daily familial life and only 20% to the social life, the extension was to be the opposite with 80% for the guests and 20% for the family.

From an architectural point of view, it meant that we had to understand the extension as complementary yet opposite element to the existing house. While the architecture of the original house was “closed” and exhibited discrete banality, the architecture of the extension had to be more open and extra­verted.

But opposition doesn’t necessarily mean segregation, and we designed the extension as a continuous space spiraling from the ground floor to the roof level. It departs from the existing dining room and has been extended with the new living room /study/ cigar corner, and it ends in the roof connecting the new kid’s room and play room with the old common children room. In the ascending part one finds two guest rooms connecting visually with the ground floor with the upper level, and becom­ing the link between the social and the intimate sides of the house. The existing house is incorporated as a part of a con­tinuous circulation from old to new, from ground to roof and from intimacy to openness. The Spiral House embraces a part of the garden to form a patio between the extension and the existing house creating a visual link between all the rooms and the two levels while maintaining a nuanced level of intimacy.

The extension and then existing house have an ambivalent relationship. They have more or less the same area and therefore cohabit without any clear hierarchy. Sometimes the extension steps back and leave the foreground to the existing house and sometimes it decisively takes over the old structure depend­ing from where it is observed. Together they form a “Siamese” body made of two opposite yet complementary parts. They form a diptych. They are two chapters of a story about the sudden change of destination of use the old farmhouse and its land into an urbanite’s mansion. The brutal appearance of the extension precipitates the whole on a new and unexpected course, like the storm in the plot of the Groundhog’s Day. In this case the extension is not conceived as a continuation of the existing one, but as an unexpected and external event chang­ing the course of the “plot”. In that sense the two bodies are not converging in time, but are precipitated together in a new situation like Phil and Rita in the initial script; where instead of being back to normal, they were kept irreversibly captive of the time loop and are forced to explore together the possibilities of this new situation.