Location: Madrid, Spain
Project Date: 2005 (December)
Final Date of Work: 2008 (June)
Author of the Project: Antón García-Abril
Collaborators:
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- Ensamble Studio
- Javier Cuesta (technical architect)
- Débora Mesa (associate architect)
- Elena Pérez (project manager)
- Marina Otero
- Ricardo Sanz
- Jorge Consuegra
Promoter: Hemeroscopium
Construction Company: Inorganic Matter
Consultants:
Facilities: Obradoiro Enxeñeiros
Structure: Jesus Huerga
Area: 400 m²
Photo credits:
- Ensamble Studio
- Roland Halbe
- iwanbaan
Hemeroscopium is the place for the Greeks where the sun sets. It is an allusion to a place that only exists in the senses, that moves and yet is a real place. It is delimited by the references of the horizon, by the physical limits, it is defined by the light and it occurs in time.
The Hemeroscopium house captures a domestic space, and a distant horizon. And it does so with an exercise in the unstable balance of structures that surround the room, allowing the vision to escape. And he does it with heavy structures, in broad strokes, so that their arrangement causes the gravitational action that moves the space, and thus defines the place.
The order of structural stacking generates a helicoid that starts from a stable support, the mother beam, to develop in an ascending direction with increasingly lighter structures until closing the sequence with a point that culminates the balance system. There are seven elements whose encounters respond to their constructive nature, to their requests, and their efforts express their structural condition.
With this, the house becomes airy, light, transparent, and the space that has filled its interior rotates with life. The apparent simplicity of their joints requires complex engineering thanks to the reinforcement, and the pre-stressing and post-stressing of the steels that sew the soul of the beams. A year of engineering to build the structure in seven days, thanks to a total prefabrication of the parts and an assembly schedule perfectly coordinated by a technical script.
All our effort to develop the technique in search of a specific space. And so a surprising language emerges, where the form disappears giving way to the bare space. The Hemeroscopium house materializes the culmination of its balance with what at Ensamble Studio we ironically call the G-spot, twenty tons of granite, expression of the force of gravity and physical counterweight of its entire structure.