1983 Eupen
By the grace of a Lady
- Marguerite S -
who stated that
architecture is a matter of thought,
I was able to build this first house ....
Marguerite did not claim to know architecture.
But she did claim
that there is architecture in itself.
And that to know architecture,
one must have studied it well.
A bit like Plato said about politics.
You have to study it for forty years before you can claim to practice it.
Marguerite knew that I was working
on the thought of architecture.
She chose me.
So she told me nothing about architecture.
She only let me know what her furniture was ...
that she needed more storage space...
and that she wanted to live on her garden side....
(The house to be built being along a rather noisy street in town
and the backyard quite beautiful with a big old tree.....).
*
The architectural answer was simple...
A wall thick enough
to contain storage space
divides the house into
a street side and a garden side
It is also thick enough to make it clear
that you have to cross it
to feel the partition
between the street side and the garden side.
On the street side,
a concave wall is the backdrop to the noisy street.
On the garden side,
a convex wall seems to
seems to push the garden space into the house
where somewhere its curve finds its centre.
In front of the garden is a courtyard of the same architecture.
The house is thus of
straight lines and curves.
Curves that open up the space
towards the other.
As it is necessary in the city
where the other is very present.
The house is therefore of straight and curved lines…
as can be seen
in the drawing of the idea of the house,
that clearly indicates
that the spatial structure of this house,
if it is established of lines and surfaces,
does not stand on any volume.
Points, lines, planes, surfaces...
But no volume!
So no enclosure.
But a structure
which is made of the opening to the other.
Or which could even continue towards the other.... !
No opposition therefore
between finite and infinite,
between interior and exterior,
between the faces of the sides and the depth.
Laterally, the structure seems to be
open to a continuation....
A second house was also requested
but was never built....
The common walls therefore seem to be
simple partitions.
But it is clear that the project
could have constituted a street... a city...
We note two other points.... :
We can see immediately in the plan that
the center of the house is not in the house...
It is outside the physical space of the house...
This is already a non-renaissance centrality.
The center of structuring is
outside the house in the Real or in Nature
outside the architecture...
The second point is the facades.
Marguerite was a classical person.
The facades are therefore classical ... :
Proportionate windows ... A simple rhythm.
The reasoning was that
the facades do not structure the space
but are an added image
to the spatial structure of the building.
It would have been better to have no facades
and that the structure appeared as such.
But here the notion of a double wall was used
on the one hand for the load-bearing structure
which is also the architectural structure
and on the other hand the cladding
to put an image on the building.