It is a living space in the heart of an Oasis, which is both shy and rebellious. Conceived as a small fortress that is articulated around a courtyard in which the boundary space is blurred, where the interior and exterior merge.
Through the guidelines natively and naturally revealed by the genius of the place, the house is the object of a light-dark architectural walk submerged by palm trees, dunes, and the sky.
Casa Mateo is also the result of a series of architectural and formal researches, where each element is meticulously thought through by the juxtaposition of functional, formal and contextual parameters. The walls are the object of a screen, sometimes blind and reflecting, sometimes open and communicating. It is a game of concealment and opening mastered or rather a disorder ordered half closed that reminds us the essence of traditional Moroccan architecture.
The house is composed of 2 elements: the covered built space (the indoor living space) and the outdoor intramural space*, making the right balance between the mineral and the vegetal. Indeed, the central courtyard is the continuity of the existing green framework that subtly crosses the exterior envelope of the house. The aim is to give birth to an architectural work that embraces its environment, from which the sensitivity and finesse of its insertion is apparent.
At the courtyard level, a diagonal wall faces the pool: it directs and divides, protects and exposes. It is an element of rupture which seems almost accidental by its position, except the effect sought of a flexible spatiality which adapts to several temporalities by its plasticity, its permeability and its insertion which gives rise to distinct types of appropriation.
It is a question of the relationship of the man to his space, to understand his needs, to imitate his behaviors and to translate them to an architecture adequate for him and by him.
The pool is part of the matrix component of this translation of need while highlighting the relationship of scale and function. This space is thought as a double-edged screen. We speak here of a watchtower, a space that makes the eye an entity by offering a series of openings, visual breakthroughs, framing adapted to the two positions of the man and his posture standing and sitting (in his bath).
Casa Mateo is not only an architectural response faithful to its context, but it is a scenario of life, a scenography, the art of inhabiting one's space, of understanding its context and its essence, of submitting to the environment while subtly asserting itself. To open up and know how to protect oneself, a game of fullness and emptiness, of light and shadows, of mineral and vegetable, of flexibility and rigidity, of lightness and heaviness... It is quite simply an architecture of antitheses.
View Original