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Sumit Singhal
Sumit Singhal loves modern architecture. He comes from a family of builders who have built more than 20 projects in the last ten years near Delhi in India. He has recently started writing about the architectural projects that catch his imagination. The Island House in Courbevoie, France by Clément Lesnoff-Rocard + Gil PercalMarch 12th, 2021 by Sumit Singhal
Article source: Clément Lesnoff-Rocard + Gil Percal This project, initiated 3 years ago, could be considered as an antagonist allegory to the famous movie “Cast away”, lost on an island : it shows one’s relationship between isolation and the concept of wholeness, or how to create your own symbolical home out in the wild, despite being separated from the rest of the world. Conversely, here the project is about finding a way for a family to have its own universal and symbolical wild landscape inside their home, surrounded by the city but deeply separated from its looming pressure. It was somehow prophetical, considering the pandemic we are living right now and our eventual never ending lockdown conditions.  Image Courtesy © Simone Bossi
 Image Courtesy © Simone Bossi Isolating and Protecting Located on the outskirts of Paris, at the very foot of La Défense, an otherworldly accumulation of oversized high risers, the house stood almost lost on the edge of a tiny little street that ends abruptly abutting the massive fundaments of a cluster of towers. This brutal situation, in between high density modernist utopia and the modestly grandiloquent 19th century architecture, emphasizes the feeling of being a tiny little Défense-less being. The house seemed like an oyster without a shell, lost in the ocean. Luckily it was articulated around a little exotically planted patio garden and we decided at the first visit with my partner Gil Percal that this house had to be protected from this outer predatory world, turning its back to the street and only looking at itself, its garden and its own qualities, yet to be found. As many 19th century urban houses, over the years the house had been quite parasitized by the consecutive owners’ interventions. Even though this accumulation of random decisions can sometimes create magic, here it didn’t. Space was suffocating and textures were shouting at each other in a belligerent manner. We had to find a way to create ‘one’ out of the many ideas that lived in this space. We had to remove a lot.  Image Courtesy © Simone Bossi  Image Courtesy © Simone Bossi Truth of nature Connecting the elements, even if this sometimes means destroying or removing, also means creating elements. We had to create a whole new world with its own specificities, with its own language and atmosphere. Isolated from the outside world ; within itself. Even though as architects life can sometimes seem like a big theatre play in which we build decors, for this project we were looking for a truth, a certain evidence. If everything is real in what we do, nothing is at the same time. Maybe a definition of truth could be in the things that happen without our intervention, without a decision or just without us. And there is one thing that truly happens without us : Nature. Everything had to be done to transfer a universal natural evidence into a designed inner world, or a place where design is not designed anymore, and just happens. A natural process. An architectural garden of Eden. An island.  Image Courtesy © Simone Bossi  Image Courtesy © Simone Bossi Elements What a moment of divine beauty, when you make way for this other truth where your usual trivial facilities become natural elements. When your grey green tiled floor becomes shallow water. When your long concrete sofa becomes a sand beach where the water tickles your feet. When a massive oak tree table becomes the big tree around which you gather as a family. When a matte black kitchen becomes the charcoal you found in the burnt forest. When a towering library becomes the cliff you climb everyday, and the books in it become the stepping stones that help you get higher. When an oversized curtain becomes a waterfall, or even just the wind. When a white concrete curved bridge becomes a stratus, a low cloud, passing quietly above your head. When a gigantic bay window becomes nothing but the sky, with its sunsets and sunrises. When a wooden staircase emerging from the shallow water becomes the beginning of a path to go somewhere else, up the mountain, above the clouds. Then you see it. It is your island, it is the island of everything. You can now close your book, put it back on the shelf and go for a walk in your garden, the real one. An architect said once, about his villa Alem in Portugal, that God is just a man in his own garden. I would say that I am a man, but God is the garden.  Image Courtesy © Simone Bossi  Image Courtesy © Simone Bossi  Image Courtesy © Simone Bossi  Image Courtesy © Simone Bossi  Image Courtesy © Simone Bossi  Image Courtesy © Clément Lesnoff-Rocard + Gil Percal  Image Courtesy © Clément Lesnoff-Rocard + Gil Percal  Image Courtesy © Clément Lesnoff-Rocard + Gil Percal
Tags: courbevoie, France Categories: House, Interiors, Residential |
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