The project
DESIGN BRIEF
Designing a house for a family, depending on the place and on the family, can be an interesting challenge, especially when its future users come from a distant country and from a cultural context that feels exotic to us, with a lifestyle and climate very different from ours.
In the case of this single-family residence designed for an affluent family in the north of Africa, the floor plan study, for instance, resembles an urban masterplan more than an architectural plan, reminding us once again that "design scale" is one of the great challenges, and probably the most fascinating, of this profession.
Planned to be built on a flat site of approximately 25,000 sqm, in an extremely arid environment, the house's "footprint" effectively occupies 15,000 sqm to create its own microclimate, leaving the remaining 10,000 sqm at the back of the site for the equestrian activities practiced by the family.
The vast residential program includes various types of living and reception rooms, study and work offices, leisure, sports, and meditation rooms, generous suites, and even a bunker-residence for situations of escalating conflict, which are frequent in that region.
A special challenge for our team was understanding and resolving the dynamics of this family's life, given the high number of relatives and assistants who live together within this patriarchal context, governed by a rigid social hierarchy. Each one eventually found their place within this functional arrangement, supported by advanced technology and clad in formal archetypes predefined as mandatorily traditional, which we tried to reinterpret in a more contemporary way.
