Architecture practice BUREAU was commissioned to design the renovation of an old dentist's office located in Geneva, located at the southern tip of the vast Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Its orography is characterized by being surrounded by the Alps and the Jura mountains, with views of the spectacular Mont Blanc.

The project aims to respond to non-standardized typological forms of a home, responding to diverse and non-static functional programs in response to the heterogeneity that the composition of a current family can represent.

The design, which according to the architects is presented as a grouping of "flows", is proposed on one of the floors of a building from the 1980s, which from its beginnings was designed to house artists' studios, commercial and housing spaces.
Molar House designed by architecture studio BUREAU is a renovation with a program that structures the space in a free way. The house is characterized by the large amount of natural light that falls on it, this is due to two transverse skylights, perpendicular to the important openings facing north.

The idea of allowing the incision of so much natural light is due to the intention of generating a physical experience throughout the empty space without partitions. Curtains, furniture, and glass surfaces organize the space with "soft enclosures", allowing the home to be a "changing machine".

Domestic material experience is mainly summarized in industrial wood paneling, obsessively used floors, and necessary partitions.


Molar House by BUREAU. Photograph by Dylan Perrenoud.
 

Project description by BUREAU

The exploration of domestic spaces goes on, working on creative variations of supports and stages for the everyday life. If there is anything like a standard family, statistically it would be this one: cohabitants of a given space, not necessarily coming from the same parenthood. They have different rhythms, different lives. They meet and spend time together at home, they navigate between different homes. The houses are thus both temporarily and permanently occupied. Kids and adults come and go. And at one point everyone is adult and the uses of the spaces need re-definition, reconfiguration. But we started the sentence with “if there is”. Actually, there is not.

The recognition of simple inhabitation diversities does not seem to own a place in architectural standards, legal and cultural ones. Houses are still considered in its vast majority as static places for normalized families that our profession likes to classify in types. The thousands of apartments that are thought and built under official norms and regulation follow a very determined image of the family. Is this image programmatic?


Molar House by BUREAU. Photograph by Dylan Perrenoud.

As everyone knows and experiences, life is quite bumpy or even unpredictable at times. How do homes and houses absorb these expected movements of life? What architect Mary Otis Stevens described as the Flux of Human Life is just our very natural way of being, of grouping and ungrouping temporarily or permanently. Does the elasticity of the inhabitants as a group find spatial responses in our homes?

In the case of this apartment, a former dentist cabinet, the attempt is to welcome that “flux” and stay open, to keep the possibilities of spatial evolution exposed to what might happen in time. The existing base helps. The small building was designed for a mix use of modest artist’s studios, commercial and living spaces in the early 1980s. The space is structurally free, letting the light in through 2 transversal skylights, perpendicular to the important north oriented openings.The very idea of openness translates into a physical experience as not much is walled.

Spaces, confinement and the needed feeling of gentle enclosures are defined by other means other than partitions. Informed and inspired by the great work of Lilly, the architecture of curtains primarily takes care of the organization of the spaces. Curtains and glazed surfaces arrange the possibilities of perceiving and impeding, opening, closing and other in-between situations. The full house becomes a sort of perceptive shifting machine as textiles, furniture and light unfold at ease, provoking different situations, visual and experiential.


Molar House by BUREAU. Photograph by Dylan Perrenoud.

The domestic material experience is mainly wrapped up in industrial wood panels, obsessively used floors and necessary partitions. Furniture, objects, carpets built-in elements, are dealt with as if everything was alive, less as a gesamkunstwerk than as a dynamic theater stage without spectators where everything is part of a relation, a conversation, moving and displacing around at any moment. The possibility of disorder is present at all times.

More information

Label
Architects
Text
BUREAU. Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide.
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Project team
Text
Concept design.- Daniel Zamarbide, Galliane Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta.
Project execution.- Daniel Zamarbide, Jolan Haidinger, Katerina Gkimizoudi.
Construction supervision.- Daniel Zamarbide, Galliane Zamarbide.
Publication drawings.- Taïma Matthes, Eleni Charcharidou.
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Area
Text
120 sqm.
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Dates
Text
2023.
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Location
Text
Geneva, Switzerland.
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Photography
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
BUREAU, is the new project by Daniel Zamarbide. The practice hides under its generic name a variety of research activities. BUREAU makes things as an urge to react to the surrounding physical, cultural and social environment with a critical standpoint and with an immersive attitude. BUREAU is (in 2017) a furniture series, an editorial project, a design team, they are architects.

Daniel Zamarbide obtains his master degree at the Institut d’Architecture de l’Université de Genève (IAUG) in 1999. During his studies he followed the workshops of Christian Marclay, Philippe Parreno and Catherine Queloz at the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Geneva.

In the year 2000 he becomes one of the founding members of group8, an architectural practice that has acquired an important national and international recognition.


Daniel Zamarbide has developed through the years a particular interest in the protean aspects of his discipline and nourishes his work and research through other domains like philosophy, applied and visual arts as well as cinema.

As a guest lecturer and jury he has been invited at a diversity of international schools and institutions to present and discuss his work and research.

Since 2003 his interest in research and education has led him to be invited as an assistant in the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and as a professor (2000-14) at the Haute École d’Art et de Design (HEAD) in Geneva. In 2014, he integrates the team of ALICE Lab (Dieter Dietz) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as a guest professor and research director.

In 2012, Daniel leaves group8 to start a new practice with Leopold Banchini, architect. Their practice, BUREAU A has explored during 5 years the possibilities of architectural making in a great variety of formats, opening the practice to work in the fields of art, garden and landscape architecture, exhibition design, temporary architecture and object making.

In 2017, following the dissolution of BUREAU A, Daniel Zamarbide pursues his more personal research interests under the name of BUREAU. This new entity produces architecture in the continuity of BUREAU A and incorporates to his already prolific activities furniture design (with a design brand of the same name) and an editorial project, which launches the first publication in June 2017.

Read more
Published on: November 4, 2023
Cite: "Light and open space. Molar House by BUREAU" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/light-and-open-space-molar-house-bureau> ISSN 1139-6415
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...