Joe Rollo’s book assembles recent exemplars of concrete’s use in house design
Concrete Houses: The Poetics of Form
by Joe Rollo
Thames & Hudson, 304pp, £39.95
Joe Rollo’s book on concrete houses is subtitled, with a nod to Gaston Bachelard, ‘The Poetics of Form’. For Henry Moore, “Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me, its best setting and complement is nature.”. Concrete’s properties as a cast material lend it to sculptural form, deployed here to make distinct, individual homes. While some of the villas represented are in cities or their suburbs, many have rural surroundings, by lake or sea, on rocky outcrops, on farms and in forests, where the material’s quality of interaction with light is perhaps the more striking.
Camberwell House, Melbourne, Australia, 2015, by Andrés Casillas de Alba and Evolva Architects (ph: John Gollings & Jeremy Weihrauch). The client is deeply interested in the work of Luis Barragån, although the concrete finishes, complete with regularly-spaced tie holes, were inspired by Tadao Ando.
The author has selected nineteen projects published over the last fourteen years in C+A, a large-format Australian magazine of concrete architecture that he conceived and edits for a body representing Australia’s concrete industry. Unsurprisingly there is geographical bias, with more than half the included houses located in Australia, although others are in Brazil, Portugal, Japan, the USA, Sweden and the Netherlands. Each is portrayed over as many as twenty pages, comprising a description, a page of plans and drawings and plenty of generously-sized photographs.
Dovecote, Braga, Portugal, 2016, by AZO Sequeira Arquitectos Associados (ph: Nelson Garrido). The in-situ board-marked concrete structure is a raised on a single pier above what was the lower level of a dovecote.
The scale of the properties ranges greatly. Dovecote in Braga, Portgual, designed by AZO Sequeira Arquitectos Associatos, is set at the boundary wall of a garden, and comprises a single room apparently floating over the former base of an old bird coop. Smart Design Studio’s Indigo Slam is an extravagant house for a Sydney art collector. The plywood formwork for the jutting in-situ facade, inspired by the sculptures of the Spanish artist Eduardo Chillida, took a year to make. Its civic-scale staircase climbs four flights to a height of fourteen metres.
The monumental staircase at Indigo Slam, Sidney, Australia, 2016 by Smart Design Studio (ph: David Roche, © Judith Nelson)
The decision to use concrete may be determined by practical considerations. Small House, by Domenic Alvaro of Woods Bagot Architects in Sydney, is in the district of Surry Hills. Road closure in the inner city is expensive but the high-quality prefabricated concrete panels could be stacked and erected in just four days. The concrete mix included recycled slag and fly ash, with off-white cement used to lighten the appearance of the finished panels.
Small House, Sidney, Australia, 2010 by Domenico Alvaro Architect (ph: Trevor Mein)
Surfaces vary. For Alex Popov & Associates’ Whale Beach House in Sydney the concrete was soda-washed to draw out natural salts – a method used by Jørn Utzon at the Sydney Opera House – then buffed to a waxy lustre. At Villa Waalre near Eindhoven, Russell Jones enriched the concrete with titanium dioxide, which gives it a chalky-white hue and makes it near-impervious to water. The bark of surrounding fir trees inspired the decision to use rough-sawn boards for the formwork.
It is a Garden, Nagano, Japan, 2016, by Assistant (ph: Daici Ano). Roof planes fold inwards to draw and bounce light into the house from its five courtyards.
Sou Fujimoto’s House O is a concrete bunker whose irregular, branch-like plan affords various views over the Pacific Ocean in Tateyama, Japan. “I prefer cave-like unintentional space, something between nature and artefact.”. A coarsely- finished board-marked exterior contrasts with more pristine interior surfaces, where cedar planks were used for casting.
Villa Além, Alentejo, Portugal, 2014 by Valerio Oligati (ph: Archive Olgiati), whose walls result in pitched planes “like petals that open and close to the sky”
I find the outstanding project to be Valerio Olgiati’s Villa Além, created for his own use in the Altentejo region of south-west Portugal. Only one fifth of the building’s total area is residential, the remainder forming a great walled garden. Concrete flaps to the tops of the perimeter walls fold out or in like those of a cardboard box, forming shading roofs to walkways, the colour of the concrete complementing the local earth.
