[ group8 ] Red houses

Architects group8 have completed three houses in Crans-Près-Céligny, Switzerland.

The houses are constructed from red, poured concrete.

Each house has a sheltered loggia on the first floor as well as an open terrace.

Here’s some text from group8:

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RED HOUSES
The invasion of the individual villa type can be seen as a ‘plague’ or as the inevitable result of a continuous hybrid landscape; a landscape composed with nostalgic ideas of a country side that has been planned too much and a ever-growing suburban sprawl. The position of the architect in this case is delicate. Should he work within the given reality of this deteriorated situation? Or should he fight against it –refuse to build in this density and typology?

The red houses place themselves in this type of problem, planting another object in this saturated suburban landscape. In this case, the purpose would be not to build an object but a small ‘ensemble’: a little community of  individuals who can, through the new scale of the intervention, constitute a good mixture of urban and landscape architecture.

The placing of the three unities follows that logic. Searching for the best orientation and geometrical relation among each other, the volumes appear as a geological landscape, somehow as if the whole settlement was thought out as a garden with three important stones.

These stones are earthy red. The coloured concrete gives that irregular impression of a material that has been poured and will evolve and change over the years. The colour works also as a distinctive characteristic in order to separate the ensemble from the surrounding eclectic architectures.

The geometry and the volume of each houses serves another purpose: to propose a rich typology, capable of creating an experience of diversity of spaces inside the appartments. The important loggias in each volume enhance this idea. Not only the villas possess exterior terraces but they also have these big loggias, and protected exterior space.

Project team:
Chistophe Pidoux
François De Marignac
Gregoire Du Pasquier
Gabriel Du Pasquier
Christian Giussoni