Hasta La Ideas

Spanish architect Alberto Campo Baeza has extended a house he completed 25 years ago in Madrid by adding a boxy white studio in the garden.

First completed in 1988, Turégano House was designed by Alberto Campo Baeza as the home for graphic designer Roberto Turégano and his partner, actress Alicia Sánchez.

The couple requested the addition of a small garden studio to serve as a workplace for Turégano.

Campo Baeza’s concept for the main house had been to create a simple white cube, so for the extension he decided to create a volume that appears to be an exact quarter of the existing structure.

“Next to the ‘cubic white cabin’ we built a little white box,” he explained.

Glazing is positioned at the two ends of the building, offering residents a view right through, while the two long elevations are left as austere white surfaces.

To strengthen this relationship with the house, the architect installed an identical stone floor inside the studio. “Thus the two pieces are in complete harmony,” he added.

The final addition to the space is a circular skylight, intended as a counterpoint to the strict rectilinear arrangement maintained elsewhere.

Campo Baeza has also recently completed a pair of houses in Spain – a poet’s residence with a secret garden in Zaragoza and a concrete hilltop house in Toledo.

See more architecture by Alberto Campo Baeza »
See more residential architecture in Spain »

Photography is by Miguel De Guzmán.

Here’s a project description from Alberto Campo Baeza:

Little White Box

Next to the “cubic white cabin” we built a little white box.

Some time ago I wrote a text entitled “Boxes, little boxes, big boxes”. And my first box-project that I created and built was Turégano House, in Pozuelo-Madrid, almost 25 years ago. A white cube measuring 10x10x10 metres: a “cubic white cabin”.

So now to celebrate the event after all these years Roberto Turégano y Alicia Sánchez, who are now more friends than clients, have asked me to build this new piece. Alicia Sánchez is one of the leading actresses of the Spanish stage and Roberto Turégano one of our foremost graphic designers. And this little piece will be his studio at the foot of his house.

The result is very simple: a little box measuring 10x5x3 metres, as if it were a quarter of that cube. The new piece is in line with the existing one in its external walls and the use of the same stone floor ensures continuity with the house inside and outside. Thus the two pieces are in complete harmony. The short external walls of the new white box are entirely open, transparent and continuous. A large circular skylight in the ceiling is the counterpoint to this spatial arrangement.

The post Little White Box at Turégano House
by Alberto Campo Baeza appeared first on Dezeen.

Delicate glazing fits around a bulky concrete structure at this hilltop house in Toledo by Spanish architect Alberto Campo Baeza (+ slideshow).

With views stretching out towards the Sierra de Gredos mountains, the two-storey Casa Rufo was designed by Alberto Campo Baeza as “a hut on top of the cave”, with a sequence of ground-floor rooms overshadowed by a long and narrow rooftop podium.

A concrete canopy, described by the architect as like “a table with ten legs”, shelters a small section of the podium and is surrounded by frameless glazing, creating a transparent room that is visible from the surrounding garden.

A staircase leads directly down from here to the living and dining room below, where the architect has placed the entrance to the house.

Rectangular cutaways transform some of the rooms into open-air courtyards. Two bedrooms face in towards these spaces, rather than out through the exterior walls.

Another opening reveals the location of a parking garage, while a smaller void functions as a rooftop swimming pool.

A row of poplar trees was planted behind the house, helping to screen it from views from the north-east.

Alberto Campo Baeza lives and works in Madrid, and also teaches architecture at the Madrid School of Architecture. His other projects include Offices for Junta de Castilla y León, a glazed office block concealed behind a sandstone enclosure.

Other Spanish houses on Dezeen include a converted stone stable and a residence that looks like a cluster of concrete cubes. See more houses in Spain »

Photography is by Javier Callejas.

Here’s a project description from the architect:

Rufo House, Toledo

The brief was to build a house on a hilltop outside of the city of Toledo. The hill faces southwest and offers interesting views of the distant horizon, reaching the Gredos Mountains to the northeast.

The site measures 60 x 40 m and has a 10-metre slope. At the highest point, we established a longitudinal podium, 6 meters wide and 3 meters high, that extends from side to side the entire length of the site. All of the house’s functions are developed inside of this long box, the length of concrete creating a long horizontal platform up high, as if it were a jetty that underlines the landscape with tremendous force.

This long concrete box is perforated and cut into, conveniently creating objects and voids to appropriately accommodate the requested functions (courtyard + covered courtyard, kitchen, living room-dining room-hall, bedroom, courtyard + courtyard, bedroom, garage, swimming pool, bedroom, courtyard).

In this distribution the living-dining room opens to the garden while the bedrooms face onto courtyards open to the sky and garden, affording them the necessary privacy. The stairway connecting the upper floor is situated in the area behind the living-dining room.

On top of the podium and aligned with it, a canopy with ten concrete columns with a square section support a simple flat roof, as if it were a table with ten legs. Under this roof, behind the columns, is a delicate glass box. To protect the views of the house from the back, a simple row of poplars were planted.

Once again, the theme of the hut on top of the cave. Once again, the theme of a tectonic architecture over a stereotomic architecture.

Location: Urbanización Montesión, Calle Brezo parcela nº 158. Toledo
Client: Rufino Delgado Mateos
Area: house: 200 sqm, patios 120 sqm

Architect: Alberto Campo Baeza
Collaborating architects: Raúl Martinez, Petter Palander
Structure: Juan Antonio Domínguez (HCA)
Surveyor: José Miguel Agulló
Builder: José Miguel Agulló

The post Casa Rufo by
Alberto Campo Baeza appeared first on Dezeen.