Single family house in Grabs

At the time I planned this house, it stood on its own, in a meadow away from a village. So I had a choice. Should I make a house with a garden and its own definite boundaries? Or should I make only a point – a house with all things included in it? I decided on the later. The house is a cube that occupies the centre of the space. It has no boundaries. From inside you have open views into the expanse garden. Yet the interior is private, its windows set back behind a terrace and screened with sliding shutters. The geometry of the cube is not precise: two of the corners are not exact right angles. Correspondingly, the terrace is not a consistent width around its two sides. The terrace is cantilevered extension of the basement ceiling. Although it is lifted just a few centimetres off the ground, this is enough to draw the space of the meadow under the house and bind it to it. Diagonally across from the terrace is the carport. The house lies in a slight hollow below the level of the driveway, and I thought it would be interesting to make a projecting canopy to accentuate the dip. The canopy has the same importance as the other volumes of the house. The space below it works together with the space below the terrace to draw in all the volumes of the house, to pull them in on themselves, with an almost magnetic force. The people who live here and had previously rented one of the apartments in Trübbach. The man, a builder, wanted to have his own house in concrete. The material is treated in a very direct way. Cast with marine ply, it feels smooth, almost ironed. I cannot say here that I chose concrete purely for its visual qualities. I needed it also for its structural possibilities. Everything here is concrete – the external load-bearing walls, the projecting canopy, the cantilevered terrace, the flat roof. This structure is only possible in concrete. The form and the material require each other absolutely.

Peter Märkli