Casa D’Estate | Switzerland | 2010

[Buchner Bründler Architekten]

Located in Linescio, a small village in the remote Rovana valley, is a 200-year-old stone building that should be rebuilt as a summer house. The building comprises a cellar foundation, which extends deep into the steep slope. On the first floor is a simple, unheated living space without water, above which is a hayloft with a loggia-like porch. The wooden structure with stone base, built in log house style, perpendicular to the building, was previously used to dry chestnuts. The building was empty for fifty years.

The original, archaic building structure should be preserved. The decision to create a summerhouse made it possible to do without heating, window, and isolation and thereby leave the facade in its original state. The interior will be completely new, but conceived as equally simple and unfinished: as an autonomous concrete volume.  The interior offers space for the most elementary residential needs: living space, sleeping niches, and fireplace. The chimney, a cube of concrete projecting from the back wall, becomes a heat reservoir for the sleeping area lying directly above it.

The concrete for the interior construction was cast layer by layer from the uncovered roof.  From the exterior, the new structure is visible only in two places: at the steel-framed glass garden doors, and the concrete chimney, which penetrates the old shell. The adjacent building is reinforced with steel supports. Within are a kitchen and bathroom whose sparseness corresponds with the overall concept. A new passageway connects the two buildings. Behind the existing doors and windows of the older building, small slots in the concrete volume open over the entire length of the former two stories. The windows can be closed by oak shutters on the inside. In an open state, the view glides out to the open space, past the original interior facade, and through the old window openings.

An interaction between old and new arises from the presence of the old natural stone wall in the modern interior. Chestnuts once dried over an open fire in the current bathroom – as evident by the soot-covered roof timbering. The bath is a tub worked into the floor, into which water flows from above out of a long steel pipe. Text description by the architects.