ARCHITECTURE: An Irish house is one of nine very different contemporary homes – one inspired by a tool shed, another by the smell of concrete – ain an architectural exhibition in France
DUBLIN-BASED Boyd Cody Architects were among nine practitioners from nine European countries chosen to participate in an exhibition of houses depicting different ways to live at the Villa Noailles on the French Riviera – which also happens to be one of the first modernist houses in France.
Designed in 1923 by French architect Rob Mallet-Stevens, it was built for wealthy socialites Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles. Insatiable art collectors, they hosted fabulous themed parties at their new home overlooking the bay of Hyères. Early films by Luis Buñuel, Jean Cocteau and Man Ray were shot there.
The rather unappealing house, built within the ramparts of Chateau Sainte Claire, is now run by the International Festival of Fashion Arts Association. It is seeking to rekindle the Noailles’ tradition of discovering and supporting young artists – including, quite rightly, younger architects making a mark in their own countries.
The latest exhibition, Nine Architects, Nine Proposals to Live, displays extremely varied houses from Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, France and Ireland. It also gives an insight into the thought processes of their designers, how they work and the personal "universes" they inhabit. Boyd Cody's minimalist house at Bohermore, Co Kilkenny, is the only one that's lived in by its designer, Peter Cody.
Each room occupies its own bay, “inscribed” within a square of 15x15 metres, and Cody says, “I dream it could extend to infinity by the serial addition of rooms; live and sleep in a dance of equations and shadows”.
French architect Rudy Ricciotti confesses that he was “motivated by the smell of concrete” in designing a 400sq m villa in Provence with a 44-metre glass wall and a swimming pool to match. He is devoid of jealousy, saying it is “morally right that those who have money spend it in France”, contributing to its economy.
The Netherlands is represented by SeARCH & CMA – with a house buried on rising ground in the Swiss Alps. Explaining this, they say: “As Dutchmen, we are aware of the shortage of land and we strongly believe that we need to use this resource more intelligently in order to offer nature as much space as possible to survive.”
Coincidentally, Swiss architects Bassicarella embedded their drystone-clad house overlooking a lake in Switzerland. They wanted to “reinterpret the rural rules of local construction” and aimed “to incorporate this small object into the site and its capacity to react to the grand scale of the landscape”.
Johannes Norlander, representing Sweden, also had environmental preoccupations in designing a simple holiday home for a family on a heavily wooded island in the Gothenburg archipelago. “I wanted to have the feeling of being in a hut, to relax and enjoy the calm, with a simple lifestyle in harmony with nature.”
For Italy’s SPEDstudio, the inspiration for their “primitive” house near Gubbio was a tool shed “in an attempt to create a new ‘scenery’ for living”. Clad in zinc and timber, and orientated to take advantage of sunlight, they wanted to “help our clients discover something they have never seen, or were too blind to see”.
The Egyptian-born architect Bassam El Okeily, who’s representing Belgium, has radically reinterpreted a standard-sized Flemish terraced house in Bilzen, giving it an entirely glass front, to “bear witness” to the lives of its inhabitants – a man and woman – and their respective passions for the world of art and the history of art”.
He conceived the design “working with models, sketches, 3D, daydreams while walking down the street and moving between these tools randomly, following no rules”.
Now, he says his work will take on a new dimension as a result of having “the most intense experience of my life” over 15 days in Cario’s Tahrir Square.
Striking contemporary architecture characterises both entries from the Iberian peninsula – Spaniard Fran Silvestre’s sleek white house in Ayora, an exercise in geometry like nothing else around it, and Manuel Aires Mateus’s intriguing effort to make “a radical image that represented the ‘idea’ of home” in Leiria, Portugal.
Aires Mateus once designed a hotel for Dublin’s Grand Canal Square that would have looked as if it was hewn from rock; what’s been built there, however, is a travesty. Just as literature transforms the banality of language, he believes that architects must achieve “poetic transformation” working with doors, windows, roofs.
The exhibition in Hyères is unconventional. Spread through four large rooms, it has one showing all of the architects’ sketches, another housing their models and photographs of the nine projects, a third illustrating the kind of things they’re interested in while the final room is given over to 10-minute film “auto-portraits”.
Curated by Florence Sarano, it runs until March 25th. But beware: don’t attempt to drive to the Villa Noailles. The switchback roads leading up the steep hill are narrow and more pot-holed than any rural road in Co Cavan, even in the worst of times.
