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Architects: Wim Goes Architectuur
- Area: 167 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Eva Fache
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Manufacturers: RENSON, Betopor, Fermacell, NIBE, Tradiva Antra mat, Velux
Text description provided by the architects. In the Flemish landscape, on a parcel fringed with pollard willows and surrounded by swamps, marches and farmlands, The Gallery House is located. Its character is strikingly honest and straightforward. The gallery house and its environment evoke tranquility, simplicity and memory.
The language and the use of materials connect to the context. Purified details, based on a “countryman’s logic” lead to a self-evident simplicity and readability of the architecture seemingly ‘belonging’ to the landscape.
As well as the shifting from gallery to house (and house to gallery), a program, suggested without determining space as footprint and ecological considerations in an actualized context, form the topic of the project.
The decision to build with wood partly lies in the material itself: its touch and smell, its growing pattern, the joinery, and the atmosphere it generates. This project reveals the timber as part of its structure, with beams running through the façade at a heart-to-heart distance of 600 mm, partly covered with natural calque plaster. These visible beams are made of 80 x 250 mm Oregon wood. The construction forms a grid, the grid forms the house. The half-timbering with 80 x 80 mm Larch strips towards the outside accompanies the window frames, with the noticeable white painted windows meant to open.
Hempcrete is used to insulate the Gallery House in between the wooden structure and the half-timbering. This insulator is compatible with timber and takes care not only of the building’s insulation but also its thermal mass, acting as a battery storing the heat and dampness, thereby controlling humidity. Both balance the conditions of the air that is breathed and carry the life inside of the house with tenderness.
The construction is vulnerable to the natural elements (wind, rain, and sun). (Non-treated) aluminum canopies on different heights protect the façade and regulate solar gain. These strips overlap at the corners. This attitude reminisces old regional techniques (see reference painting with a view on Tournai, Belgium, Adolphe Delmée, 1864) to preserve bare wooden constructions.
Different atmospheres, light and shadow, the perception of space and form, openness to the inhabitants and the passerby, and the transition between in- and outside, manifest themselves according to the variation of the natural elements: The wind and the sun creating lights and shadows, the earth with whom the project negotiates within the landscape and water as the natural carrier of flows and processes of everything.
