jo taillieu architecten . photos: © Jeroen Musch
An old farmhouse in the heart of an old village. Beside the church. Beautiful. Too beautiful.
Listed.
Too beautiful. For it can’t really be used any more. So now what?
The farmhouse must stay. The farmhouse stays. But different.
The farmhouse stays. As a mould for the house.
The farmhouse frames the house. Embraces the house openly.
The house has a clear ground plan. It takes up the space it needs. No more. And that space is drawn in an extremely compact and precise way.
The farmhouse around it further delineates the sense of space. From the interaction in the old, strong walls and fragile transparency of – and then the reflections from – the glass surface of the house, a world comes into being which is called space.
The walls of the farmhouse are clearly delineated.
The structure of the house equally so. A grid of wooden columns and porticos elucidates the house. The house is actually neither more nor less than structure and glass.
One column is spirited away in order to make room for space. That could perhaps become the minimal definition of what it could be. Architecture.
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