Final+Project

= = =Final Project= Click on the image to go to the video =Klein House= The Project I __**present**__ was about designing an artist’s house, where Life and Work could share the same place harmoniously. **Client** The client was specific. In my case, it was Yves Klein: an important and recognized French conceptual artist with very specific tastes and likes, besides a totally unusual way of thinking and acting. He developed an interesting ideal about immaterial matters, and a love for something he called The Void, a sort of emptiness deity that rules the connection of the body with the spirit, on his own words. **Needs** The plot was back-to-back to other three constructions, like a row house, with only a free façade, which looked to a central square. It had 12 m wide and 16 m long, with a maximum height of 12 m and a possibility to dig 4 m down. The minimal program of the building included the spaces of access, gallery, studio, teaching rooms and dwelling, besides services and distribution. **Idea** With all this information in mind, I started to think of how the house was going to be, and I had an idea that would rule the entire design. In one of his polemic performances, in which Klein used naked models as living brushes, he explained he tried to distance himself from his own art, with the purpose of maintaining himself clean. That, with his concept of The Void, was expressed in a simple solution: two volumes as far from each other as they could in the plot, one as the dwelling and one as the public part of the building, with gallery, studio and teaching area. The first one would fly up in the air, his Life being pulled down by the Void, and the second one, that resembled his Art, would be in contact with Earth. The most beautiful result of this solution is the big empty space between the volumes: it lightens and gives fresh air to the entire building, and it’s necessary to pass through it for entering and leaving the building, as well as for going from personal to public spaces. **Structure and spatial organization** The structure, steel framed but with different span sizes, was a challenge, not because of the size or the weight of the building, but because of the purity of the spaces, that resulted almost destroyed with every column I placed. Finally, I understood that I had already placed an ordering system that ruled in the building: the light and delicate bridges that crossed through the space were part of it, so structure could be a part too, and finally the entire distribution system was placed on it. This straight axis talks about the personality of the building’s owner and his work system: repeated and systematic, his art becomes almost scientific sometimes. Besides, this axis gives hierarchy: served spaces at the left, and serving spaces at the right side. **Materials** I imagined a pure white house in which Klein could be free in his art, and where no colors besides the blue of the water and the sky could disturb him. Thus materials had to be pure and clean: steel, painted reinforced concrete and glass. I took advantage of glass, using it in curtain walls that let the light through into the building and make hard volumes visible, but minimizing reflection by the right placing of it looking only to the north and the south. **Final Solution** Solving every of these factors: client’s needs, structure, materials, form, order, and giving the design something else, that is my own understanding of Klein’s art and my own believes, surged this solution, just one of infinite possibilities of the result of designing an artist’s house and studio.