AB House | ANDREESCU & GAIVORONSCHI

The plot where this house was built in the last years, is in a residential area in the north of the city. It is not a typical plot, it was a big piece of land which was parceled in the nineties.

Like all other houses, this one also keeps the alignment to the street. Nearby, on the left, there is another house which I designed 13 years ago, and this one is in a way a replica because it develops the same idea of a „house on a house”. It has to do with a social phenomena typical also for Italy and Greece, that young members of the family remain to live with the parents and, in a traditional way, young families coexist with old ones. This coexistence was sincerely expressed in both cases: the „young house” on the „old one”.

Wood means young, fresh, stone has to do with the roots, the long time... A wood house on a bigger stone house.

More than that, this juxtaposition has to do with a public/private dialectics. Stone solid walls „defend” and close a little the private area. In AB house, this character of fence house is equilibrated by the subtraction of a typical traditional „grey” space of public/private interaction at the entrance. There is also a ramp which is for the pedestrians to enter the house. It is parallel to the fence and in the future will be covered by vegetation. Behind the house, the theme of intermediary is also important. It is represented by the patio and the covered terrace, „the outside eating room”.

The entire plot containing a pool also is  a quiet landscape which you see from the inside and it is unified by the wooden fence as a dominant horizontal element.

Inside the house, because of the coexistence of two generations, but also because of other elements of the clients brief, there is a two direction topology:

-          the horizontal one, of the parents area, which embraces also the patio;

-          the vertical one which juxtaposes the spaces of the „two houses”. This juxtaposition is happening on the living room area, where a typical “raum-plan” pattern is developed, with intercalated levels and oblique views.

The living room is developed as a “theatre”, you can observe it from different levels. There is also a more private part, at the first floor, like the “women’s room ” in traditional oriental dwellings, a space from where you can observe but you are not observed. There is “an interior wooden fence” of aligned vertical elements which are closing/opening this relation.

It is a space for a future library, a space for smoking, etc.

The apartment contained in the wooden house from above is enough also for a young couple. The inside/outside relation is also developed here, without dismantling the unity of the box: an intermediary space to the south behind wooden louvres, a thin balcony to the west, to observe the atrium and the dawn and a vertical incision to the east, to directionate the rising sun….

A separate outdoor entrance to this box wooden house is also possible, but not now yet.

There are also green elements – cooling with wooden waiste or the sun panels on the roof.

Materials used are romanian lime stone from Vistea (Transylvania), wooden doors and windows manufactured at Targu Mures (Transylvania), Italian wooden floors, Italian exterior wooden cladding and steel boards covering.