House C by RTA-Office

Rose Etherington | 21 March 2011 4 comments

This house in Barcelona by architect Santiago Parramón of RTA-Office is clad in slabs of basalt.

Called House C, the residence curls around the site through two storeys and a basement level.

The closed outer face of the building gives way to glazing round the inner courtyard, which contains a pool and lawn.

The information that follows is from the architects:

House C. Barcelona

Geometry, skin, cuts that let you discover the dermis.

Space, three-dimensional continuity. There are no elevations, no plans, or sections.

This is space within a solid object, a block of black basalt in which we make a number of penetrations as in a quarry, mine tunnels and corridors that communicate with the outside, with the light of the morning, of noon and the darkness of the night.

Santiago Parramón, founder and director of the atelier RTA-Office, designed House C as the indivisible cross-sectional view of the object, with an emotional design.

Dark skin, pale dermis. Contrast. Cuts and cracks, reinforcing the change of scale, working for the presence.

A unitary object that proposes its maximum dimension.

The complexity of the site works in our favour: the closed outer perimeter, walled, stony; inside the glass folds open. We traverse the wall. It's the north face of the building and there we place the access: a spectacle of natural light, reflections, transparencies, an explosion of multiplying images.

A kaleidoscopic space, beauty, image, observation. Everything at the same time thanks to the effects produced by the transparent crystals of different sizes and angles. Everything impacts on the building. Nature enters the interior through these cuts and segments the different rooms of the house.