Casa unifamiliare, Zahara

This project for a villa overlooking the Atlantic Ocean belongs to Alberto Campo Baeza’s investigations of the relationship between the natural landscape and architecture. This Spanish architect sees architecture as a “built idea”. The principal components of architecture according to Campo Baeza are “gravity, which constructs space, and light, which constructs time”. The model of this single-family home in Zahara (Spain) represents the central idea of the project: the archetype of the podium, reduced to the simple geometry of a 20 m long and 12 m wide parallelepiped carved into a rocky slope. Topped by a large platform, it is almost metaphysical; the plane of this surface emphasises the line of horizon and the setting sun.