Built space

A house somewhere west, Romania

Principal author

Tiberiu Bucșa, Maria Koller, Gál Orsolya

Co-authors (team members)

Tiberiu Bucșa, Maria Koller, Gál Orsolya

Architecture office

S.K.B.D.

Project year

2018

Location

Jud. Arad, Vladimirescu - Intravilan, str. Viena, Nr. -

Client

Koller Florin Mihai

Budget

90000 euro

Build surface area

175,78 mp

Project description

The house of Maria and Florin is not a special case, looking at the context of Romania (at least) in the last 15 years. A young couple builds an individual house outside the city. The posibility to buy an affordable plot on an ex-agricultural land as well as the presence of a child that feeds the idea of a house with a garden stand as basic premises for most such decisions. The consequence, seen from above, is a set of unstructured islands that surround the cities. In street-view, theese settlings, nor urban or rural, usually lacking previous planing, seem like unfinished puzzles, alternating pieces that are strongly decided through firm fences and buildings, buildingsites, large surfaces ruled by spontaneous nature, unfinished streets, and weird infrastructure objects that challenge gravity. Small universes of punctual certitude inbetween a general unpredictableness. Looking at it on a smaler scale, the houses seem expressions of the “individual” understood as a need and way to build, leading to a collection of sizes, colours, tastes and geometries, as if in a museum of lost objects. The project proposes an answer to theese premises: a simple geometry, almost archetypal, as well as a form of compact and complex household, meant to negociate relations, with the street, towards the garden and according to the neighbours. The core of the house surrounds itself with the necessary annexes and active cells, generating, through their placement, a set of differently exposed spaces: the double oriented livingroom, the kitchen that looks in three directions, a courtyard that connects them between three walls, a terrace that makes the transition to the garden, the sleeping-rooms hidden under the space of the roof. The pictures are taken one week after the young family moved in. The garden is under preparation, the fences are missing, the clothes are drying on the kitchen terrace by the table. This particular state of intermediate on a small scale can also be perceived as an expression of un urban island still unfinished, with all the consequences involved. As the parents of the second newborn tell us, there is already a comunity of kids playing on the empty fields around the houses.

Text description of the author

The team of the project is unusual. Maria, architect, the owner of the house, had an attempt to be an architect inside her own large family. The consequence was that they asked for someone else to deal with the negociation: friend architects.

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