House Hemeroscopium by Ensemble Studio

Project: House Hemeroscopium

Location: Las Rozas, Madrid
Architect: Ensamble Studio
Project date: December 2005
Date of completion: June 2008
Architects collaboration: Elena Perez, Debora Bureau - Ensemble Studio: Jorge Consuegra, Marina Otero, Ricardo Sanz
Technical Architect: Javier Cuesta
Promoter: Hemeroscopium
Construction company: Inorganic Matter
Site: 400 m²

Hemeroscopium is the place for the Greeks where the sun sets. It is an allusion to a place that exists only on the senses, moving and yet it is a real place. Is bounded by the references of the horizon, by physical boundaries, defined by light and occurs over time.

The house Hemeroscopium grabs a domestic space, and a distant horizon. And it does so with a balancing of unstable structures that surrounds the perimeter of the room allowing vision escape. And it does so with heavy structures, large strokes, so that your cause gravitational action that moves the space, and thus defines the place.

The order of stacking helicoidal that generates a structural part of a stable support, the beam mother, so go developed upstream structures with more and more light until the closing sequence that culminates with a point system of balance. There are seven elements whose encounters respond constructively to its nature, its solicitations, and their efforts reflect their structural condition. This house becomes air, light, transparent, and the space has filled his tour with the interior life. The apparent simplicity of their encounters requires a complex engineering through the armed, and the pre-and postensado of steels sew the soul of the beams.

A year of engineering to build the structure in seven days, thanks to a total prefabrication of parts and assembly of a cadence perfectly coordinated by a technical script. All of our effort to develop the technique in search of a specific space. And so there is a striking language, where the way to step away, leaving bare space. The house Hemeroscopium embodies the summit of your balance with what we call at Ensemble Studio ironically point G, twenty tons of granite, expressing the force of gravity and counterbalance its entire physical structure.