Doors—
Summer House for Two Lawyers
Punta del Este, Uruguay
1977
The door, a basic element of architecture, is the generating notion for this house in a garden. The door separates nature from culture, open from closed; it is a threshold, a transition, abrupt or articulated, not only between exterior and interior, but also between public and private, between architecture and the city.
This house is generated by the forces of architecture and the city. Public space is incorporated in this most private domain—the house—and articulated with the basic notion of the villa type—the piano nobile. This superimposition generates a series of transformations based on the frontal versus centralized forces in the project.
The building is articulated by three monumental doors: two lateral doors, which permit visual and physical access from the front to the back garden without entering the house, and a central door, which unfolds into a series of doors in the central interior space, which acquires the quality of exterior space.
In approaching the central door, one must climb a set of steps to a podium, as if ascending to a piano nobile. Once through the door, one must descend another flight of steps in order to get into the central space. With this gesture, one is ‘out’ again, so to speak, into a court with doors on all four sides. A set of columns forms a cube within this court. Four perspectival spaces open out from these columns. Each is transformed by the specific articulation of the columns with stairs, walls, and openings. This articulation is the result of the superimposition of frontality and centrality. This collision produces the explosion of the volume and the sequence of transitional elements and places that continually relate outside and inside, garden and house. Frontality is marked by a freestanding screen with three doors cut into it, by wings penetrating the central space, by a loggia in the garden, and by a triangular pond in the back. Centrality is marked by two interior and two exterior ‘rooms’ that extend the central space in a biaxial scheme.
The door becomes a frame where architecture and nature confront one another; rather than represent one another, they meet. The door plays the role of mirror where one side is the image of the other by inversion. It is the locus of the transformation of the oppositions it implies. This set of oppositions is constantly inverted; it generates the resolution of this project as a series of transitions between various ‘outsides.’ The transitions emphasize the aspects of permanence and change, through static and dynamic spaces, and are essential to making place.
This house is generated by the forces of architecture and the city. Public space is incorporated in this most private domain—the house—and articulated with the basic notion of the villa type—the piano nobile. This superimposition generates a series of transformations based on the frontal versus centralized forces in the project.
The building is articulated by three monumental doors: two lateral doors, which permit visual and physical access from the front to the back garden without entering the house, and a central door, which unfolds into a series of doors in the central interior space, which acquires the quality of exterior space.
In approaching the central door, one must climb a set of steps to a podium, as if ascending to a piano nobile. Once through the door, one must descend another flight of steps in order to get into the central space. With this gesture, one is ‘out’ again, so to speak, into a court with doors on all four sides. A set of columns forms a cube within this court. Four perspectival spaces open out from these columns. Each is transformed by the specific articulation of the columns with stairs, walls, and openings. This articulation is the result of the superimposition of frontality and centrality. This collision produces the explosion of the volume and the sequence of transitional elements and places that continually relate outside and inside, garden and house. Frontality is marked by a freestanding screen with three doors cut into it, by wings penetrating the central space, by a loggia in the garden, and by a triangular pond in the back. Centrality is marked by two interior and two exterior ‘rooms’ that extend the central space in a biaxial scheme.
The door becomes a frame where architecture and nature confront one another; rather than represent one another, they meet. The door plays the role of mirror where one side is the image of the other by inversion. It is the locus of the transformation of the oppositions it implies. This set of oppositions is constantly inverted; it generates the resolution of this project as a series of transitions between various ‘outsides.’ The transitions emphasize the aspects of permanence and change, through static and dynamic spaces, and are essential to making place.