Casa AM14
AM14 House is a single-family residence set within the agricultural landscape of Lorca. A house that aspires to become a village, a settlement. In the heart of the Guadalentín Valley, with Lorca Castle rising in the background, the project establishes a place upon the vast continuous plane of the Lorca countryside.
Pierre Sernet’s installation The Simple Act of Sharing Tea serves as the project’s point of departure: how can the minimum protective structure be created in order to focus attention on the experience taking place within it?
The house is located on a plot whose boundaries are defined exclusively by vegetation—olive trees and artichoke fields. The project is conceived as a sequence of nine volumes, each associated with a particular activity: cooking, eating, talking, sleeping, working, storing, and so on. The rotation and fragmentation of these volumes in plan allow natural light to enter the interior from different angles, reaching areas that would remain untouched in a house defined by parallel edges. In this way, the experience of the house is transformed over the course of the day and throughout the seasons.
Each parallelepiped relates to the adjoining volumes while remaining several metres apart, generating small open courtyards or outdoor rooms that can be enjoyed at different times of day and in every orientation. The inhabitants can walk around the entire 360-degree perimeter of the house on level ground, following multiple routes drawn into the plan as an integral part of the design.
Through their differing heights, the volumes evoke the landscape of a small settlement, as though they had stood there for decades. They resemble a group of modest structures gradually added over time, eventually forming a small neighbourhood. A house that aspires to become a village.
On the ground floor, the main entrance opens into the daytime living area. This includes a kitchen that can be separated by a sliding partition concealed within the geometry of the house, as well as a dining room and living room. The space then narrows to provide access to four bedrooms, a dressing room, an en-suite bathroom and an additional bathroom.
A small studio rises above the rest of the house, offering privileged views towards Lorca Castle and access to the roof by stepping through one of the square windows that define the façade composition.
Morning dew, artichokes, stainless steel, pine bark, terracotta, photovoltaic energy, olive trees, pipes, Ettore Sottsass, crickets, Moriyama House, aerothermal energy, cultivated earth. Belonging, ecology and technology come together to generate a new contemporary landscape in southeastern Spain.
