CONCRETE ABSTRACTION.

Design of a house, on an eminence above a Spanish village, celebrates Euclidean geometry and tranquillity.

This new house by Alberto Campo Baeza backs into the crest of a north-facing hill in the village of Sevilla de la Nueva, about a twenty minute journey from Madrid. From it you can see across a wide landscape, lightly forested and rolling away to the distant Sierra de la Almenara. Here and there, half-hidden away among trees, are white forms of neighbouring villas.

Set beneath the canopy of a large ilex, Campo Baeza's building is composed of two parts: an ethereal superstructure and a horizontal concrete platform. Resembling a bunker, the platform is sunk into sandy ground and perforated on north and south by square unadorned openings (which emphasize rather than lessen the inscrutability of the structure).

But deliberate and visible conjunction of substantial and insubstantial lends meaning, so that the house seems a metaphor for opposing and essential aspects of existence. As an essay in formal abstraction, it corresponds over time with the temple archetype of antiquity.

Campo Baeza describes the base as a cave and refuge (seen from certain points it appears imperforate). It contains living quarters laid out with geometric precision, and oriented towards the north and the views. The house is symmetrical, though from the north it may not be evident because the building incorporates a swimming pool on the west, and because of the irregular pattern of openings in the northern wall of the central living room.

Rooms are hierarchically arranged so that served spaces are at the front, services to the back. As you move away east or west from the living room, spaces become more private so that a bedroom and bathroom are found at each extremity. The interior is as pure as its exterior suggests, its effect depending on harmonious proportion and quality of light. Illuminated by the simple openings, the barely furnished rooms are filled with soft luminance reflected off plain white walls and floors of pale stone. As usual with this architect, detailing is immaculately executed.

Like Jacob's Ladder, a flight of stone steps between kitchen and living room ascends to the light and a glass box shaded by a canopy on slender columns. Such dematerializing, surprising in this climate, has been seen before in Campo Baeza's work -- for example, in his design of the Inca business centre in Majorca (AR October 1999). There, too, he employed sheer membranes of frameless glass to keep enclosure as insubstantial as possible, with the depth of overhanging roofs calculated to keep the interior in cool shade. This glass box, raised above surrounding forest, was conceived as a place 'from which to contemplate nature'. To the west of it, the severe rectangular form of the swimming pool scarcely disturbs abstraction.

Architect

Estudio Alberto Campo Baeza, Madrid

Project architects

Alberto Campo Baeza,

Raul del Valle Gonzalez

Structural engineer

M. Concepcion Perez Gutierrez

Construction team

Francisco Melchor, Juan Sainz

Photographs

Hisao Suzuki

1. Main north face.

2. South-west corner.

3. South face.

4 North-west corner.

5. Stairs to glass pavillon; kitchen to left, living room to right.

6. Living room and big north-facing window.