The desire of a young farmer to live near his family-run farm led to the drawing-up of a Farm Development Plan where his home/work-place, as well as the future homes of his siblings, becomes one of several groups of buildings in a ‘rich complex for country living’ intended for people, animals, tools, and equipment. This inspired a harmonious rural architecture design project.
In the country, there is a simplicity that is born from practicality, from the economy, from the rationalization of equipment and techniques. Houses are simple dwellings designed with specific functions in mind. This corresponds to austerity in design bordering on the ‘almost nothing’, then brought to life by day-to-day living, by the variety of materials, by the wise re-use of elements, by the transitory nature of solutions.
The housing module is composed of:
a living wall, the alignment of rooms on two levels, which have a direct rapport with the outside and an inside rapport with the hallway.
A ‘passage’ wall within which there is the distribution axis on the ground floor, the metal stairway and landing of the first floor made of standard section bars and metal grids. Like a fence, the wall extends the house to include other outdoor rooms (farmyard, pergola, garage for future expansion). In the siblings’ houses the wall will change: into a light support structure for greenery or into a glassed-in two storey volume.
The design project is based on criteria of environmental eco-sustainability: thermal masonry blocks with in-between cork insulation, ventilated roof, radiant-heat floor, solar panels on the flat roof, climbing plants on the west-facing wall, shading system made from micro-perforated sheet metal for various types of filtered light.