Villa

This number of 2G contains three introductory texts written by the British critic Ellis Woodman, the American historian Joan Ockman, and the architects and editors of the magazine San Rocco Pier Paolo Tamburelli and Andrea Zanerigo. To complement these, the Nexus section includes texts by the architects themselves and an interview with Enrique Walker. All the buildings have been photographed by the superb Dutch photographer Bas Princen.

With a track record stretching back ten years, the studio of Kersten Geers and David Van Severen has tackled all kinds of projects from a radical POV: quasi-utopian city proposals, frontier posts, single-family houses, government buildings, exhibition designs and pavilions. Their architecture has not only to do with the design solutions that emerge but depends on radical reformulations of the programme—such as emptying the Belgian Pavilion in the 2008 Venice Biennale of Architecture and filling it with confetti—rigid schemes in plan—like the square divided into nine of the villa in Buggenhout—the construction of spaces based on concatenated rooms (or enfilades)—like the weekend house in Merchtem—or the burying of the volume—as in their villa in Brussels or the design for the Kunstmuseum in St. Gallen.

This freestanding dwelling is situated in the middle of a plot between woods and an agricultural area near the village of Buggenhout. The enclosure—a modular steel fence—is an integral part of the design and defi nes the volume of the house. The surrounding unkempt garden is not included, and functions as vehicular access around the house. The dwelling itself is composed of two levels: an open “outside house” on the ground floor, and a closed “inside house” on the first floor, with views of the woods and rural landscape.

The outside house is conceived as a patio villa with a garden. Its thick double walls—two load-bearing layers of standard brick, painted white—carry a concrete platform that forms the base for the inside house. The inside house is a compact set of rooms in the depth of the roof of the patio villa. This is conceived as a wooden box that covers the platform, which is made watertight by covering it completely with a dark plastic membrane. All detailing on this project is designed from the inside out: the huge sliding windows are added to the façade in such a way that the frames are invisible and do not impose on the impressive views. These are directed at the still open, rural landscape, while the neighbouring houses remain relatively invisible. By deliberately moving the fence in from the edges of the property line, the dwelling becomes actually “freestanding”—a rare luxury in carefully demarcated Belgium.