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Architects: A6A
- Area: 203 m²
- Year: 2018
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Photographs:Agnès Clotis
"To build is to shelter. Raising walls to protect, and put a roof over, make shade." Pierre Lajus.
Building a detached house nowadays, and particularly in the Royan region, a territory marked by the arrival of the modern movement during the 1950s, represents an architectural exercise in its own right.
The interest is not to bend to an aesthetic or a dogma, but rather to take advantage of this opportunity to better understand its vocabulary and codes. They go well beyond a façade work, and very often push the drawing towards a great intelligence in plan and a strong flexibility in the ways of appropriating it.
The idea is to build a two-speed house. First, a place for the couple, whose activity will be gathered on the ground floor. Then, when the family is complete, the floor and its terrace offer the necessary surfaces to accommodate children and grandchildren.
We wanted to work an architecture that opens with measure, controlling the light, in the ways of Palazuelo’s engravings, where the black (the shade) is torn to occasionally let the white (the light) pass through.
From this desire comes a frank project, heavy. Surrounded by notions as stereotomy, thickness and gravity. The concrete block is coated with white, to catch this light from the ocean, and only the floor and rooftop elements appear in its true raw nature. This gray concrete marks two broad, horizontal lines, anchoring the building further in the ground.
A house where you feel sheltered.
