Open-air sculpture / MRA

Architects: Marek Rytych Architekt
Location: Poland
Project team: Marek Rytych, Krzysztof Kryska, Joanna Kiepas
Project Area: 436 sqm
Project year: 2005
Photographs: MRA

Through this house you can rush by and not even notice that you have trespassed a kind of a border. There is no threshold – literally and figuratively. Paved road, on which we step towards the entrance penetrates the interiors and comes out on the other side of the house, in the garden. It looks as if somebody threw a stone carpet on the ground. As if somebody has dictated hard conditions, has commended some risk taking.

The project was designed in the company which specializes in the industrial architecture. It wasn’t an easy answer to clients’ order who are contemporary art collectors.

Elevation materials were used in the interior as its raw decoration. They cover the walls fading away the difference between the inside and outside spaces.

The sheet metal appears in the dining room and in the bathroom. Wood and brick are in the hall, living room and In the sections for the guests. The kitchen wall with the stigmata of the bricklayer’s formwork next to the granite table tops and steel home appliances looks like a modern fresco. The stairs seen in profile reveal their ‘incompleteness’ – concrete pulp contrasts with the epidermis of the wooden floor. The roughness of the interior was important and needed here. This house is like a sculpture, like a painting and art likes enormous spaces and most of all it likes uneasy solutions.

groud floor plan

Because of this the ground floor of the house has been entirely opened. On the more than 100 metres area – only the screen wall slightly seperates the living room from the staircase and the kitchen which is behind it. Many interesting views and perspectives are being created. Numerous windows of different shapes and a number of terraces put on different levels absorb the green surrounding of the house. There isn’t much furniture but they gently merge into the background, not interfering into living and artistic space.

The house is a three storey building designed on the undulating area. The roughness of the area was used in a way that in the cellar section immersed in the ground there are storage rooms and in the section which has access to daylight there are guest rooms. Above them there is a daily living section, and higher there is a private section with bedrooms and bathrooms. The L-shaped solid is differentiated by terraces put on different levels and by numerous bay windows thanks to which the interiors can be illuminated.

The elevation was covered by concrete brick, pine tree siding and titan-zinc sheet metal. All these materials emphasize the artistic sculptural play between separate architectural elements. The terraces were covered with concrete, sett and exotic wood.