The Casa Mueonga / Snow AIDe project was presented by the design team as a modest shelter residence that integrates harmoniously with the surrounding natural environment, composed of woods and streams.
The Casa Mueonga / Snow AIDe project was presented by the design team as a modest shelter residence that integrates harmoniously with the surrounding natural environment, composed of woods and streams.
The house's location provides a unique experience, being situated only one hour from Seoul. This allows visitors to experience the variations in lighting and landscapes throughout the four seasons.
The project team provided a detailed description of the The Orb House / Chiasmus Partners development. This project is located in Hyangrindongsan, in the Dongbaek-dong area of Yongin.
The site constitutes an established residential enclave, characterized by the distribution of single-family homes extending across vegetated slopes. The buildings were designed respecting the natural topography of the land.
In the design, elements such as retaining walls, trees, and level variations are integrated, generating multiple layers of visual connection. This arrangement guides the observer from private garden spaces to the more distant landscape.
Situated on a hillside, the land offers a natural framing of the view, encompassing both the neighboring village and the surrounding forest.
Casa Óculo, a single-family residence located in a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Palma, was conceived based on a notably simple yet bold architectural gesture: an extensive flat roof extending from east to west. The project uses light, materiality, and climate as central pillars of its conception.
The rational form of the house was shaped to respond to a south-facing slope, offering expansive views of the mountains and meeting the needs of a structured client program. The final result is a contemporary Mediterranean home that manages to harmonize efficiency, tactile sensitivity, and a strong sense of belonging.
The roof is supported by a series of load-bearing walls coated with lime mortar, arranged along the north-south axis. These walls play an organizational role in the spaces, establish the rhythm of the building, and function as visual filters. They protect the sides from adjacent plots while framing wide and directed views towards the south and the mountains. Furthermore, this orientation optimizes natural cross-ventilation, ensuring continuous passive thermal comfort throughout the year.
The vast roof acts as a protective element surrounding the house, generating generous verandas around the perimeter. These shaded transition areas soften the boundary between the interior and exterior environment, providing sun protection during hotter months and allowing the house to be used adaptably in any season.
On the main terrace, a central component stands out: a solar oculus cut into the roof. This oculus has the geometry of an oblique and eccentric truncated cone. It was specifically designed to capture winter light and direct it into the living room. Thus, the oculus creates a dynamic focal point of warmth and luminosity that gradually moves throughout the day, from the dining area to the living room, functioning as a domestic sundial. During the summer, the change in solar angle restricts the light to the terrace, preventing direct radiation incidence and protecting the interior spaces.
The construction employs noble and natural materials, including stone flooring, wooden frames, and natural brass details. The lime mortar, used on the walls, is a living, hygroscopic, and breathable material that helps regulate humidity, enhances internal well-being, and develops a characteristic patina over time, lending authenticity to the work.
The Mediterranean garden, characterized by being low-maintenance and requiring little water consumption, is considered a vital part of the project. It was planned to have a natural and mutable appearance, blending with the surrounding landscape and reinforcing the presence of nearby mountains. Native species form a living composition that reacts to the seasons through their flowering cycles, treating vegetation as another architectural material capable of interacting with the structure through textures, colors, and movement, enriching the house's experience over time.
In summary, Casa Óculo represents a concise manifesto of the contemporary Mediterranean lifestyle: an architecture that is efficient, tactile, and deeply connected to its place, built to interact with the climate, age gracefully, and find its primary constructive elements in light, landscape, and time.
The Treinta y Nueve Árboles house project, designed by Grizzo Studio, is located in the Karilo forest on a richly vegetated plot. Here, sunlight filtering through the canopies of dozens of trees illuminates the ground covered with climbing plants. The main objective of the project was to preserve this natural state, so the house is designed to harmonize with its surroundings, not trying to dominate them, but to integrate and intertwine with the trees.
Thus, the building transforms into an atrium for contemplating nature, guiding visitors into the forest so they can experience its atmosphere. The residential complex offers two ways to explore the forest: panoramic, which passes through the thicket both from inside and outside, and ascending, achieved via glass walkways connecting different levels. These paths allow one to understand the structure of the forest by tracing it from the roots to the treetops.
Since this is a summer retreat house, the experience of staying in the project is realized through two routes. The first runs inside the building: starting from a semi-submerged vestibule, the middle levels lead to the entire program of the house, concluding at a terrace at the level of the tree canopy. The second route invites a walk around the perimeter, first crossing the inner courtyard and the semi-open area with a fireplace at the root level, and then reaching the garden, pool, and veranda of the house.
The choice of materials for the project was made so that they would not attract excessive attention, but rather coexist with nature, allowing vegetation and the passage of time to transform and colonize the structure.
