A square in the landscape: The private commission for a small holiday home in the countryside, in the rural village of Miñortos, ten minutes from the beaches of Porto do Son.
A plot of land located on a riverbed, through which the surface water flows at a metre above ground level.
A geotechnical study indicates a road surface at a depth of 9m. and concludes that micro piling is essential.
The project idea starts from this imperative to emphasize the structural responsibility of the micropiles. A wooden structure is conceived, in direct continuity with the foundations anchored to the ground, a raised concrete slab to protect it from the river floods and sharpened at the ends to lighten its weight, and a steeply sloping roof: the final exercise is resolved geometrically in section.
The rhythm of the house, its square floor plan, responds to the geometric and transhistorical subdivision: ‘Nine Square Grid House’, the generative mechanism of the famous system of proportions which Palladio brought to country villas. Spatial organization based on nine points of support, symmetry and compositional order as a way of colonizing the landscape: the house opens up at right angles to the organic rhythm of the trunks.
The constructive order is understood as a superposition of structural tectonic layers that emphasize the orthogonal axes of the porticoes marking the central core of the installations, exploring the plastic expressiveness of the roof planes with their extension into the eaves.
The project has attempted to address the search for a formal language that is genuinely Galician, that of popular and rural architecture.
Our architectural tradition in the landscape is understood as that play of relations of opposites between the inclined plane, the plane of water evacuation, and the vertical plane, the plane of the house that gives us shelter and intimacy, and all the variations and graduations between these two that generate sub-spaces, intermediate, ambiguous and relative spaces.