It’s past time to come back to the west and scrutinize a project I dearly love, by an office I deeply admire. La Casa Horizonte by RCR gives me exactly the feeling Johnson’s Glass House gave me: I would have loved to be the one to design it. I would hate to live in it.
This time I want to be precise about why, because the reason is not taste. The house is 60 meters long. The bedrooms are 2.20 meters wide.
Let's get into it.
The Sketch: The boxes of discomfort
Casa Horizonte by RCR
The Thought: Calibrating space
The room that can become something elseThe Work: The cost of good decisions
Wokr 17, five years later
This Sunday’s live session will again be at 21:30 C.E.S.T.
Hope you can join me,
1. The Sketch
The boxes of discomfort
How good an architect do you have to be to build a 60 metre long house where the bedrooms are 2.20 metres wide? Casa Horizonte sits, as Wright would have put it, at the brow of the hill rather than on top of it. A line of corten boxes with an assertive, agricultural presence, set against a landscape it never once tries to imitate. Contrast is what defines this house. Contradiction is what defines living in it.
It is made up of 11 boxes, grouped by function and threaded onto a 60 metre spine that runs east to west. The two boxes at the east end make up the master bedroom, followed by a pair holding the kitchen and dining room. Then the entrance breaks the rhythm by reaching down to accommodate the elevator. From there the boxes come in threes: three for the living room, and finally, at the west end, three boxes, one bedroom each.
Inside a bedroom. 2.20 metres wide, 5 metres tall.
The house is full of contrasts.
You move through a tight, dark spine buried under the hill and are released into boxes five metres tall, full of glass and sky. But the walls are corten, with a very low light reflectance, so almost nothing bounces. Daylight pours in directly through the floor to ceiling panes and is absorbed on arrival. The room stays dark around a brilliant opening.
You cannot fit an ordinary sliding door into that aesthetic and still have the box read as a box. So the door became a five metre tall frameless sliding pane, electrically operated. It works. It is also slow, and faintly ceremonial, and the less intuitive a thing is to operate, the less often anyone operates it. A door you have to decide to open is not a threshold any more. It is an event.
Photo of one of the children’s bedroom from the patio showing the sliding door.
The same logic runs through the whole house. In the bedrooms the bed is not furniture. It is one of the steps, rising out of the floor. Everything here was drawn, fabricated and fixed in place: the bed, the panes, the joints, the fittings. That level of tailoring is precisely what made this house possible. It is also what makes it unchangeable. You cannot move a bed that is a stair.
I love setting rules and making my designs obey them. But when the rules start working against comfort for aesthetics, I have to ask whether it was worth it.
On Sunday I want to show you which way this house actually faces, and what that single decision costs its inhabitants.
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