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HOUSE OF THE INFINITE WALLS

Design Team: Jaime Correa

       A heavy concrete block and stucco house carrying a free-plan glass box. The house is traversed by two perpendicular stone walls shaping four courtyards which contain: a pool, an olive tree garden, a flat grassy private precinct, and the archaeological remnants of a former suburban building. The plan is composed of three buildings on the ground floor and one glass box on the upper floor. The first building contains domestic spaces: entrance lobby, guest bathroom, dining room, kitchen, and family room; the second building, with a guest house, overlooks the pool courtyard; the rear building, facing an olive garden, is accessed through a long loggia with three bedrooms attached to it. The glass box contains the master bedroom and a small art studio with four deliberate perceptual divisions of the landscape views - caused by the collision of the two quasi-infinite stone walls.

       The overall composition follows the same spirit of the infinite walls in Mies Van Der Rohe’s early projects and his infatuation with Nietzsche’s super-human figure in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. This house can be read as an honest attempt to access human feelings and emotions via the materiality of architecture. The house, its courtyards, and its four quadrants are deliberately abstract and austere to express a life of voluntary simplicity and the qualities that Peggy Noonan, writer at the Wall Street Journal, recommends for “A Plainer People in a Plainer Time”. This view is an homage to Kazimir Malevich whose work and writings had an enormous influence on the development of abstract and non-objective art.

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© Jaime Correa, 2020

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