CASA QUADRATA 0420

Design Team: Jaime Correa

A single-family house in an arid oceanfront site. The square loggia surrounds an olive garden, an over sized pool, an open-air solarium, a bar-b-cue, and three buildings containing: public spaces in a black polished concrete structure (living-room, dining, kitchen, and office space), a metallic building with a master bedroom and a covered outdoor area, and a stucco building with two guest rooms overlooking the ocean.

This is a rational composition of legible building types with a refined olive tree garden completing the open space, a bar-b-cue modeled on existing industrial chimneys, and an over sized pool within the space of a square open-loggia. The second-floor of the concrete building has an office for two people under its vaulted ceiling. Extraordinary picture views of the surrounding oceanfront are available at this level.

The continuous red loggia is gently interrupted in front of the proposed buildings to allow for a relationship between the exterior landscape, the spaces within the buildings, and the interior of the courtyard space. The building sections clearly depict the location of the building on the highest point of the island site.

The color scheme facilitates the perception of the various building types, spatial proportions, and the understanding of the overall morphology of the composition – delimited by the red loggia and the disposition of olive trees in the open garden space. The roof plan diagram serves as an abstraction of the specific location, materiality, and particular disposition of buildings and open spaces within the square loggia. As a provocation, this diagram could be understood as a “colored Nolli plan” where the black rectangle is a vaulted ceiling polished concrete building, the bluish structure a metallic building, the yellow area a stucco structure containing two guest rooms, and the purple area a solarium interrupting the square loggia in the center of the over sized pool.

Similar to an “IKEA drawing”, a building composite depicts the exact assemblage of the overall composition. It serves as a “wordless” set of instructions for the surveyor of the proposed site.

© Jaime Correa, 2020