PRIVATE HOUSE - This modestly proportioned building visually occupies the whole plot. The house; The house is placed against a backdrop of two parallel concrete walls forming acoustic and visual protection to the west. A vertiginous staircase runs up between the two walls to the roof terrace opposite the grandiose panorama of the Atlas moutains, a view especially clear in sping . With is tall volumes, flui internal divisions , play of light and shade in the surroundings, this house flows through tje land scape and melts into it. Amid olive, palm, eucalyptus, mimosa and fruit trees.
A client introduced me to a film producer in Belgium. He offered me to draw up the plans of several houses on land he had bought in Marrakech, Morocco. For many years I regularly visited Morocco. From the first trip I was bewitched by that country and the three projects studied to date are certainly fed, to varying degrees, by all the images and impressions gathered during my stays.
The main difficulty was to define the program with the client. Originally we had planned to build three houses on this site. The project gradually decreased to finally the smallest of these three houses in order to preserve the field. The client informed me he bought a second larger plot (5 hectares) under the same conditions but closer to the Atlas in order to implement the other two houses. For this first project my desire was to establish a close dialogue with the land, vegetation and the atlas to the horizon. Being a small house of 170 sqm on a plot of 2.5 hectares, we had to create a dynamic equilibrium despite this difference of scale. We played with light and shadow to enhance and strengthen the volumes.
We used local materials and techniques like clay, tadelack, Pierre de Ourika. We have preserved the wildness of the land although we have planted more than 500 trees. We doubled the walls to help deal with the climate, creating room high-rise and sun protections. Each region and country deserves architectural answers, adapted in line with requirements climatic, cultural and economic conditions.
The land is located about ten kilometers south of Marrakech. Flat, mostly drowned under a heat veil that hides horizon. It is only from December to March that the snowy atlas appears
In this 2.5 hectares area the buildings occupy only 240m ². The volumes and their arrangments permit to avoid a floating effect in this empty space. Before discovering the layout we first need to go along the clay walls, which remote the neighbors away while allowing the sight of whites geometries. Once we cross through the metal gate , earth tinted, we are suddenly plunged into a strange world. Three white steles frame and seek the longitudinal axis of the house in the center of the field. On the right side, the Guard house, two mixed cubes, is close to a totem fireplace and faces the double garage all in length studded with small openings. These simple elements articulate the vacuum around and focus the eye towards the house itself.
Paradoxically simple and complex: a foliation of longitudinals sails between wich stages the project program; tall windows; sets of geometric cutouts; framing, especially from the livingroom across the pool and its bleachers toward the atlas.