24 Rooms: a House of 100 M2
Assignment: Open Competition – Finalist
Client: Marlegno Prefabricated Wooden Building
Provided Services: Design
Dimensions: 100 + 100 sqm
24rooms is a project that starts from a reflection on the living. Designing a house is a delicate process of definition of the space of relations: among the essential acts of living of the single person, among the other inhabitants under the same roof and the neighborhood on the other side of the fence. To be honest with themselves, architects have to admit that most of them don’t live in a house conceived by an architect. When it comes to living indeed we have to deal every day with an ordinary scenario built up as a spontaneous collection of several souvenirs and temporary devices standing in the frontyard.
The ordinary house is made of rooms, having specific functions related to codified dimensions connected with corridors or service-spaces. Beyond this golden proportion, many times related more to the real estate market than to the quality of life, what is crucial is the ratio between the indoor and the outdoor area: in the best case the outdoor one is conceived as an offset of the perimeter of the house footprint.
24rooms gives the same quantity of indoor and outdoor space in terms of square meters. It has 100 square meters of indoor rooms and 100 of “gardens” arranged on a single level. The total surface of the house is developed using a non-hierarchical grid of 24 rooms: a chessboard where the blacks are the covered rooms and the whites are the outdoor spaces.
The grid is stretched, going from 2 to 4 meters of span according to the specific needs of the interiors, whether they are service or living functions.
In 24rooms there are no corridors but every covered rooms is connected to other four ones and it gives the freedom to access at least one “garden” and look into another one. Using the corner going diagonally is the only possibility of moving indoor, hence creating several combination of relations among the spaces.
The twelve “gardens” have to be read ironically as if they were the catalogue of the main key points of the ordinary frontyard: the need of having some areas to play, to relax, to have pets, to eat outside, to house the seven dwarfs, and so on...
