From the archives of A&B - the best Polish projects of the last decade
[ A&B original material 7-8'2018]
Blended with nature, open to the sky and nearby greenery, the Poznan house located on the edge of an urban reserve inspires awe with its simplicity and use of noble materials. Its creator Adam Wysocki of de.materia studio is interviewed by Malgorzata Tomczak.
Malgorzata Tomczak: A client comes to studio de.materia and wants you to design his house. Where do the conversations begin?
Adam Wysocki: The beginning of cooperation with a client is always a period of getting to know each other - I try to interview as thoroughly as possible about the order and determine my way of working on the project. In the initial conversations, I gather dry facts about the plot of land, the function of the building or the current legal status of the property, among other things, but most of all I want to get to know the man and his ideas of what the house of his dreams looks like. In order to create an individualized design, it is necessary to learn about the client's lifestyle, his taste, his previous experience of functioning in buildings and his perception of architecture.
cross section
© studio de.materia
Margaret: Please tell us about the context of the JRv2 house. Where did the name come from?
Adam: The plot on which the JRv2 house stands is unique on the scale of the city, as it lies at the intersection of two worlds - the site is located between Poznan's multi-family housing estates, with fully developed infrastructure, and the edge of the Żurawiniec urban reserve, surrounded by lush, dense vegetation. Being on the plot, one can have the impression of being far outside the city, somewhere in the wilderness, while in the meantime the nearest store or sports club is a few minutes' walk away.
The somewhat enigmatic name JRv2 is simply an abbreviation of the street name and designates the second version of the project (the first version was a more functionally extended prototype of the current house).
cross section
© studio de.materia
Margaret: The body of the house adheres to the natural slope, and the garage was planned... on the roof. This is quite an unusual solution.
Adam: At first you may get the impression that this is a rather strange procedure, but it is deeply justified. First of all, the location of the garage on the roof allows convenient access from the road level on a ramp of only a few steps. If the garage had been placed a floor lower, a much steeper entrance would have been necessary. Secondly, the compact wooden, relatively small body of the garage, standing on a low concrete plinth (which is actually the roof of the partially underground day section), is a response to the investors' expectation that the house should be hidden from the street. Observing the building from afar, it is difficult to find elements characteristic of the house.
first floor plan (residential part) and floor plan (garage)
© studio de.materia
Margaret: The layout of the residential part resembles the letter T with wings facing east and west. This naturally made it possible to maximize daylight in the house. In addition, you designed a small patio inside the block, which illuminates the living room and serves a structural purpose.
Adam: In order to make possible the procedure of hiding the house in the slope, it was necessary to design a sufficiently strong structure to resist the weight of the earth. This gave birth to the idea to move the retaining wall slightly away from the living area of the building and create a light well. The result was a very intimate patio space, with the only view of... the sky.
Margaret: This is quite romantic. And what technology was used to build the house, what materials did you use and why?
Adam: The already mentioned garage on the zero floor was built entirely of wood. Its skeletal structure was clad with wood paneling and finished with larch wood profiles. In contrast, the entire living area below was made of concrete.
One of the design considerations was to use concrete as the primary building material. Exposed concrete was to be the finishing material in both the interiors and elevations of the house. Concrete was to be poured on site, I did not allow the use of prefabricated cladding, for only in concrete casting is the sincerity of this material and its beauty expressed. Monolithic reinforced concrete walls and ceilings were the appropriate structural material for the design intentions adopted.
green roof
Photo: Tom Kurek © studio de.materia
Margaret: The JRv2 house is embedded in the natural lush landscape of the nearby reserve. You also decided on a green roof. What was the purpose of this design treatment?
Adam: The spreading of a vegetative mat with extensive vegetation on the roof was to further unite the building with the surrounding landscape. Thanks to the elaborate detailing of the attic, it became possible to bring the vegetative mat to the very edge of the roof: this creates the impression of blurring the edges of this plane and visually blending the body of the building with the surrounding greenery. The use of a green roof is also a minimal reparation to nature for the particle taken away from it by the construction.
All walls of the residential part were made in architectural concrete technology of sandwich type: concrete-insulation-concrete
Photo: Tom Kurek © studio de.materia
Margaret: What was the biggest design and implementation challenge?
Adam: Both myself and the contractor had not dealt with sandwich wall technology before, so it was a big challenge for us. We planned the order of the walls so that the least exposed ones in the interiors were poured first. This gave room for experimentation and learning on a living organism. Each successive wall turned out to be better and better.
In order to achieve the effect of a natural blending of the building into the slope, the slope first had to be partially demolished, retaining walls had to be made, and then the slope was restored to its original shape; the retaining wall was moved away from the body of the building so as to create a patio with a window to light the living room
Tom Kurek © studio de.materia
The construction was divided into phases: first the structural walls made of architectural concrete were built, then they were clad with a layer of thermal insulation, which at the same time served as a kind of lost formwork for the next layer of concrete. At the final stage, a facade layer of concrete was poured using SCC (self-compacting concrete) technology. In order to obtain high-quality concrete walls, with precisely planned formwork divisions and tie-beam openings, no system formwork was used, but all forms were made with furniture-like precision from new plywood with a smooth surface directly on site. Such technology and the design, assuming that the walls and ceilings would be exposed without being painted or plastered, required the anticipation at a very early stage of many elements whose installation was to take place much later. The invisible embedding of a system of large-size frameless sliding windows, the concealment of aluminum joinery profiles, the concealment of plumbing elements or sliding door systems required the precise construction of openings and recesses in the reinforced concrete partitions.
Malgorzata: Thank you for the interview!
