VACATION HOUSE IN TOLO
Status
Study
Location
Tolo, Argolis
At Tolo, above the beachfront, the geography changes radically and the calm curve of the coastline is replaced by the restless topography of the hills. With frequent ups and downs and mutations of the ground, each hill creates its own landscape situation. So there, high up, on one of the hills, lies the site which, with strong discontinuous slopes - 25° to 45° - leaves only a little space, in the south end, for setting up a small country house. The program is simple - a living area, two bedrooms and a guest house - with the aim to enjoy the view towards the sea to the southeast. The solution given is also simple, although, as sometimes it happens, simplicity is not one-dimensional but the result of a multi-dimensional composition of a world. And thus, the straight line!
On the curving ground, a straight line was transcribed in the drawing, in the construction a plane, and in the conceptual vocabulary something like a loggia. if we consider the appropriated landscape an organic part of the residence. This level, new ground and construction of the mind, which includes the entrance and the living areas with the swimming pool, projects in front of all the other areas of the house as if it can't get enough of the view, to the point of not caring about the shape of the ground which abandons it at some point and goes downhill. Height-wise it intervenes in the middle of the private spaces behind it which are developed on two floors, between the bedrooms above and the guest house below so that they at least take advantage of the slope of the ground.
The entrance to the residence starts and descends from above. To the left of the movement an olive tree in front of a cube-shaped white volume - a metaphor for the habitation of Nature - and to the right a stone wall just below the white slab of the roof - an optical foreshadowing. When we get down to the height of the line and enter the house the view explodes unto our sight, the blue of the pool overflows into the blue of the sea and that into the colour of our eyes.