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House C – Prax Architects
Architect: Prax Architects
Location: Auch, France
Project year: 2006-2007
Project Area: 180 sqm
Photographs: Arnaud Saint-Germès
This house project is founded on the concept of Louis Kahn: a company of space: the project consisted in organizing spaces with different uses related to the individual, around the space of family, gathered in a coherent space unit.
This project is based on the following space concepts:
- the room (space of the community) and the part (space of the individual).
Thus, establishment of the parts, (rooms or services (garage, storeroom)) defines the room, the space of life of the family (stay, kitchen); all these spaces being joined together under the same pave (roof) – the Mediterranean house closed on public space and opened on the patio-garden.
All spaces of the house dilate on the garden by the means of terraces (on all the orientations). Alls the openings “are dug” in the frontage, thus ensuring a protection the sun or the bad weather. Lastly, this building site was the subject of many details, since we drew all furniture (kitchen, chimney,pieces of furniture, etc…).
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- floor plan
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- section 01
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- section 02
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- section 03
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8 comments »
Very clean, elegant and good attention to detail, but it could definitely use some “flare.” Looks like the sum of all Dwell projects to me.
i think this house does not represents the text that describes it so well. It seems like a traditional spaced suburban house. At least that’s what I can see through out the pictures.
The concept and the plan are well conceived, though I cannot find any direct relationship to the philosophy of Louis Kahn in what is represented here.
To my eye the end result suffers from imprecise detailing and execution. Particularly the slab roof seems poorly differentiated from the supporting planes. Sometimes folding and sometimes floating the roof robs the project of an instantly understandable logic. The front entrance suffers badly from this mismatch. The entrance is coherent with the plan but not with the reality of the house. Therefore we end up in a tunnel that is decorated with a bundle of sticks because no grass will properly grow.
The biggest failing, and least Kahnian aspect of this project is its clumsy siting. Before a building by Kahn was ever a spatial concept it first examined and magnified the attributes of its site. The great architect would then overlay his theory, adapting it as necessary to maximize the value of the experience. Kahn turned ordinary sites to advantage and extraordinary sites into religious experiences.
Admittedly this doesn’t look like a great site. However, I don’t see anything in the siting of this box inserted in the downward slope of a gentle hill. That is really to bad because the structure neither rests upon or in the landscape. Again, the house is made to stick to the conceptual “mission” without adapting to its setting.
The last thing I would say is that the photography of this project does no service to the architecture. Someone who was paying attention would have made the interiors seem less dark. The haphazard Arco lamp in the living room, the bundle of sticks, the three left-over oranges, and the overall lack of composition make this house seem less inviting than it probably is. There is a reason for every architect to invest in quality photography. In a visual medium and a digital world, your work lives and dies by how it is photographed.
Terry Glenn Phipps
http://web.me.com/tgphipps
Note – please everyone take a look at the World Monument Funds list of endangered modern architecture where Kahn’s greatest masterpiece, the Salk Institute, is prominently listed as under threat. http://wmf.org/watch2008/watch.php?id=S8339
must be nice to live here
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