Fran Silvestre Arquitectos pays homage to certain works by Glenn Murcutt and Stéphane Beel, designing elongated floor plans that are configured as enormous juxtaposed longitudinal elements which, in addition to optimizing circulation, enclose five distinct spaces or gardens, each with its own identity, designed to interact with time and the large plant species that will eventually arrive.
Inside, the program places the swimming pool and guest rooms on the lower level; Above this is the daytime area, which is oriented towards the nearby view of a lake; and at the highest level are the nighttime rooms, gathered in a piece that acts as a bridge and creates a large shaded terrace underneath it.
Lago Villa by Fran Silvestre Arquitectos. Photograph by Fernando Guerra.
Lago Villa by Fran Silvestre Arquitectos. Photograph by Fernando Guerra.
Description of the project by Fran Silvestre Arquitectos
A proposal is made for an architecture that intertwines with the garden, maximizing the perimeter of contact with the landscape and dissolving the boundaries between the built and the natural. In this area of Madrid, that relationship with the surroundings acquires a singular value. To achieve this, a compact volumetry is deliberately abandoned in favour of an ascending layout that evokes certain works by Alfaro. The project aspires to resolve a dichotomy: to be both geometric and organic. Although its structure is precise, the inhabitant perceives it as something natural, almost as if it had settled into the place in an apparently random way.
The project combines two ancestral archetypes: the pavilion, understood as an open and centrifugal space; and the courtyard, conceived as a more sheltered yet open-air domain. We have always been fascinated by the relationship with the exterior in some elongated-plan projects by Glenn Murcutt and Stephane Beel, among others. The pieces are configured as longitudinal, through-running elements, obtained by means of a large-radius curve. These bodies are juxtaposed to optimise circulation. From this interplay emerge five gardens with their own identities —almost open courtyards— defined by the disposition of the architecture. Each offers a particular atmosphere and multiplies visual relationships, ensuring that the exterior is always an active presence in the experience of the whole. They are spaces prepared to host the large-scale plant species that will arrive over time.
The programme is organised according to this ascending logic. On the lower level are the swimming pool and guest rooms; above it unfolds the day area, oriented towards the nearby view of a lake; and at the highest level are the night spaces, gathered into a single piece that acts as a bridge and generates beneath it a wide shaded terrace. At the point where the different pieces converge lies the communication core, which articulates the levels and reinforces the continuity between architecture and landscape.
Ultimately, the project is born from something as ancient as it is essential in architecture: proportion. It is through a meticulously calibrated width of the elements that the desired spatial relationship is achieved. Nothing more and nothing less.
