Herrera House

A small entrance block bonds the house to the village. Behind this block is a taller volume which opens onto the landscape. The accentuated abstraction of the house s external appearance tries to provoke the fantasy that, up to a point, was always behind notions of modernity. A series of rooms, stacked one on top of the other, are grouped around a patio, which functions as an extra room. The diagonal positioning and spatiality of the living-room level is counterpoised to the set of bedrooms that try to conceal themselves from the patio. This patio space is the one against which the house is measured, against which the different rooms are calibrated. Bruce Nauman would call this the mold space : a space defined by what surrounds it, without any hierarchical organisation. A patio, then, that s a far cry from the typological idea its name evokes. A continuous wooden skin functions as a protective veil for the double-height room. At sunset this skin is suffused with colour. The sun penetrates and opens up the house, remaining caught in this huge living room. The house separates itself from the landscape, dissolving its unity and organising a complex mechanism of elements that resolve their relationship with the surroundings. This interior/exterior relationship is intended to be modified and graduated, just as the seasons or the desire of its inhabitants hopefully contribute to fusing the rooms with the attractive landscape. In constructional terms, the house has been resolved with a bone of in situ concrete screens, to which a number of cassette-like packages have been installed containing the shading, thermal insulation and secondary structure, the purpose being to liberate the views. The freedom of its relationships with the outside is intended to contrast with the restraint shown by the house. It is this duality which its uninhibited fantasy ends up displaying.

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