2012
Weekend House - Merchtem - Belgium

This weekend house occupies the complete surface of a deep lot in small town in Flanders. The long backyard of an existing townhouse is transformed into the weekend house property; the whole length becomes the house, turning the existing building into a guest house.
The new house is organized as a perspectival sequence of four equal rooms, thus providing a sequence of similar spaces whose in all is always different. The sequence of spaces organizes a variety of distinct characteristics— a garden, a pool house, a courtyard, a living room.
Central wall openings create an enfilade throughout the different spaces and a sliding glass roof enhances the flexibility of their usage.
Each of the rooms gets its specificity through its particular furniture. Together they form a set of interlocking mini-universes.
The brick walls are doubled, allowing auxiliary features such as sliding glass doors, double doors, and a replace to be placed between the walls. A steel corniche, inspired by the rail of the sliding glass roof clearly frames the perimeter.
The core of the house is formed by the middle two rooms: one with a fixed roof, where two wood elements make the space inhabitable; and the other is a tropical greenhouse with a mobile roof, which contains a bathroom unit and a swimming pool. On each side of these two rooms ends a garden room.
Closest to the living room is a simple green landscape, and between the green house and the guest house there is a paved courtyard.
In the summer the mobile roof moves over the court, turning the sequence of the four rooms into a complete house, effectively creating a weekend house cut away from any sense of context and reality: a mirage.
Each of the fixed elements in the room is an actor in the composition, carefully designed to live together with the residents and furniture.

[project selected by Kornel Tomasz Lewicki]

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Architecture as Resource / Imprint