Villa

The architects Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen reinterpreted the plot of The Buggenhout Villa by reiterating a smaller enclosure in its heart, thereby injecting a new space between infrastructure and enclosure. This new space is an intermediate federative space between public space and a built environment that, to a large extent, resembles a landscape with a public vocation. This space interacts with the public sphere and seems to extend it. The notion of natural landscape (or landscape rendered to nature) bridges the gap between private and public spaces.

Four metres from the plot boundary – the traditional distance rule – a rectangle of 13 by 29 metres was marked out in steel frames. Part of the plot was thus sacrificed in order to create a truly detached house, and to sharpen up the relationship with the immediate, generic surroundings. The enclosure, over which climbing plants grow, marks off an ‘outdoor house’ with two patios and nine rooms – some of them closed, some of them open – that are all connected to each other. A spacious metal spiral staircase rises out of the middle room up to an insulated and waterproof upper floor that holds another nine rooms. There is no trace of the conventional suburban estate villa. The Buggenhout villa takes the conditions of the residential estate to extremes and shows what is possible when the Flemish housing context is radicalised.

The rigid symmetry of the plan means that traditional living arrangements are suspended and that space has been created for variants: for an indoor and an outdoor house, or something in-between. This symmetry also means the house has no pronounced orientation. Breaking open the plot and the a priori elements of the estate villa makes unexpected constellations of life possible, moments that might depend on the weather or the owner’s social lives.

This text is based on an article by Aglaée Degros, and one by Stefan Devoldere, published in Architecture Review Flanders N°10. Radical Commonplaces. European Architectures from Flanders.