North (W)estern Armand is part of the family, and has always been a reference: handsome, older, wiser, harder, faster, and equipped with the charms of Bond, James Bond. If we were all Ferrari, hed be driven by Schumacher.
We are charmed, but we feel the competition, we want to win, we can't manage (he is a manager) so we design something irrational. We went curvy, harder than Monte Carlo, at least for auto(cad) drivers, but Armand smiles. He loves the house and scores the best lap on the curves of our project.
The core of the track is a ramp for the rampant, no steps (for tire reasons, but mainly) for the shared love for horses: so the house is a ranch, and the modulor is the horse. The living room is a living ramp, and he goes up at our speed when we go down. The roof is cut like a Canyon (John Wayne creek) and the profile of the building recalls the Alps in the background. The ranch is placed on the hills near Pordenone , facing the mountains on one side and the dry and stony planes of Friuly on the other. As the only visible human intervention prior to the construction of the house and its facilities was the railway, we decided to consider the house as a condensation of the vertical railway ties that create the fences.
The house plays with this elements, fully exploring their formal and cromatic features. The curve of the face is covered with recycled railroad ties and the whole block is landing on two hillock, leaving an under passage for the cars, horses and the rare humans. The fluyd forms of the house were suggested by the gentle movements of the surrounding hills and the suddle movements of the land.
The choice of the materials allows time to play a fundamental role in the project through the process of aging: the house will change season after season, becoming part of the surrounding landscape.
