Roman-canals House Calonge
COSTA BRAVA, SPAIN
We are talking about a privileged site in Costa Brava, more specifically in Calonge, a site with strong slopes and amazing views towards the sea in Palamós Bay, surrounded by a pine forest. The house, a family house is around 450 square meters big and is to be a summer house.
The program is divided in three levels, according each section point, ground floor with shared day spaces and first floor with bedrooms that deform themselves in order to adapt the building to the sharp site slopes. That asymmetric movement allows hosting on the roof the third level which contains the studio and the panoramic terrace.
Basically, the house is a section, dealing between regulations and natural slopes, establishing a draw between open and closed areas, between glass openings and concrete walls, with the explicit will to exaggerte the created offset in between levels and inner continuity. In the other hand, the house has to respond to a summer house functionality, simple and diaphanous, not only in uses but also in views, and assuming certain informality with interior and exterior uses, moreover being easy maintainable with non sophisticated spaces.
The project develops starting from a structural concrete envelope with flows along an established path tour through the house, staying, passing by, getting to one place to another, gazing at the amazing Costa Brava sea sights.
Each face of the house has one “leg” touching the ground, which is big if compared with the plan, but not that big if compared with the elevation. We thought its performance as a rotational direction, turning around to go from a place to another, or to turn around the same direction as the stair do: to provoke visual paths which lengthens in time and space the house possibilities: contradictory in its sensations, as heavy and light a the same time, a white elephant standing in one foot, as Botero’s paintings do.
