House Pegasus

Toulouse, France

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House Pegasus

Toulouse, France

Firm

Saint-cricq

Type

Residential › Private House

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2012

SIZE

1000 sqft - 3000 sqft

BUDGET

$100K - 500K

Photos

Patrice MENCONI (9)

The design program for this house is intended for a couple and their two children, with a living space of 1,615 square feet. The project is located in Toulouse on a sloping site with a wooded parcel boundary which overlooks a ravine.

The clients’ wishes stimulate two ways of living and guide three worlds: the parents’, the children’s, and a third shared world. They also desired to unite both below ground and above ground types of living, symbolized by the underground and the sky, in a seamless harmony. These two desires express a novel power play: one issues from a force pushing towards the depths, when an opposite vertical force seeks to occupy the atmosphere. Architecture takes these libidinal collisions as its object.

White volumes of brickwork emerge from the earth. Buried organs (or living rooms) are contorted in the economy of the masonry. In the bowels of the earth, the rooms are lengthened and contorted. Stairways negotiate the slightest topographical ups and downs to link everything together, while the organs slipping between the masses cling on to these distributive innards. This organic whole is thoroughly watertight, sufficient unto itself, but ready to support other phenomena. The downward thrust of the organs means that they have to be pierced to look for that light which suspends darkness. At the same time, there is an acoustic magma, an environment in which intensities of sound and timbre become blurred.

The second organic set is placed on the submerged part and against the white saliences above ground. Its composition is subordinate: the international dimension of the shipping container recycled as a dwelling unit follows a logic of stacking determined by its particular structure. The eight structural corners govern the combination of inhabitable units. Self-supporting, the containers are set on the subterranean base; indestructible, they are broken up to obtain large openings, and the presence of matter fades. This effect of disappearance is increased by dissociating different layers of skins which form the envelope: the steel structure of the containers, then the wooden cladding, then the suspended frames of the black wooden structures appear by letting each one co-exist.

If using containers expresses an ecological wish, this recycling becomes a poetic recycling. The use of the container goes beyond its physical and functional properties to give a particular perceptive consistency.

The Pegasus House functions like an interface between earth and sky with its two organic ensembles. They brush against one another and with each shift from one arrangement to the other, distinctive physical features are displayed, and atmospheres follow one another on the basis of their connections. By accident, a new unpredictable occurrence happens between the two systems: a diagonal. Thus, a loop of circulation is imposed, and organizes the house’s different rooms. This diagonal, the “musicality” of the Pegasus House, is a force line which influences the different arrangements and their frequencies based on the contingent forces that it encounters. This common denominator has no form, just a distributive and rhythmic function, a sort of functional ubiquity.

There is a kind of urgency that exudes from this house. Pegasus House, with its unequal degrees of permeability to the outside, experiments with this form of living urgently. In the fleeting instant of what happens, imperceptible developments are tried out based on variable speeds and rhythms; the softest encounters the hardest, the slowest the most nervous.

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House Pegasus

Toulouse, France

House Pegasus

Toulouse, France

Product Spec Sheet

Collaborating Firms

Team