Shortlisted in European Copper in Architecture Awards 2oo9, the Clip House in Madrid, Spain was designed by F Javier Bernalte and Jose Luis Leon from Bernalte-Leon y Asociados. This private residential for a client in creative line, of advertising is
a highly sculptural design formed from copper planes cantilevered from a vertical concrete spine.
Below are informations written by Bernalte-Leon y Asociados:
The plan of this house was strongly conditioned by the life-style of the client and his work in the field of advertising, with its requirements for creativity.
Because of the extremely frequent journeys of the client over the five continents as well as of his own idea about his dwelling space, the plan was intended to respond his needs for peculiarity.
In fact our client wished to obtain an open-space space plan avoiding a division between his professional and private life and shaping a link with his work, mainly based on a flowing dynamic, visually unbroken structure, naturally ensuring the interconnection between the different spheres of activity taking place in the house.
In order to find a satisfactory solution we chose a light foil which would establish the boundaries of the spaces by using single sheets of different sizes and heights according to the intended activity spheres. The largest space is to be found on the lower level and combines the living-area: the kitchen flowing into the dining-room and the living-room gathering around the fire-place.
On the upper level, which is linked to the lower one, we find the working-area, and in the uppermost part of the house we shall have the sleeping-area: more detached and to which one has direct access from outside passing through the study.
The continuous foil will be overhanging and anchored to a big wall of reinforced concrete, lodging the ducts. This wall is in the structural and non flexible core of the house and is crowned by a skylight-attic, which is, in its turn, a linear swimming-pool linked to the sleeping-area by means of a roof-terrace providing the source of light to this slim and blind area in accordance with the solid and airtight features or the concrete wall.
The foil overhangs the garden, with the main swimming-pool, giving it the right insolation. At the opposite side of this wall there will be two concrete slabs as a structural counterfort for the stress supported by the overhanging foil.
These slabs will form the garage and the main domestic area of the house in an assigned space by means of a movable wing at the upper level. Underneath the roadway an acting as a “hollow scarp wall” we find a large space intented as a ball-room in view of the professional activity of our client.
The global structural arrangement is composed of a big wall and the foil hanging from it, with its “scarp wall” an the extrados-panels acting as braces for the whole.
The materials employed create two unbroken “skins”, whereby wood is the prevailing one for the interior and copper for the outside. Without forgetting their unbroken character, the inner one extends to the outer one in some cases and viceversa. The inner lining has been designed as a planking which becomes thinner when shaping the curves and gives the space a very tactile feeling. The copper on the outside will establish a friendly relationship with the trees surrounding the house as well as with the boundary wall, which is the front of the on the street. This façade has been built with polished U-type glass, with a double vinyl-sun filter providing a shield against excessive sun rays and for the client´s privacy.
The building process is based on a rational module system with a sequence of tolled steel foils anchored to the concrete wall (to both frameworks where allowing the passage of the ducts), this shaping the development of the foils. The installations have been inserted between the outer and the inner framework thanks to a process of excellent workmanship guaranteed by the builder in order to achieve a flawless integration in the architectural elements. The furnishing and decoration of the spaces was one of the main worries of our client, which gave way to a personal and eclectic result, based on the architecture on the whole, which definitely responds to the personality of the client himself.
a+. bernalte-leon y asociados via e-architect
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