Hidden House

Collaboration with FAR Frohn & Rojas

The clients, artist Marc Quinn and writer Georgia Byng, found an extremely steep and beautiful piece of rock that descended into the sea in Formentor, the northern tip of the island of Mallorca. The site included planning permission for a conventional house, the excavation for which had already begun. The conventional house, needing to sit on a conventional flat site, meant that a vast portion of the rocky slope had been carved away, leaving a quarry-like void behind. This radically altered the natural qualities of the steep mountain site and created potential problems of flooding from the ravine that bordered the site to the north. The clients abandoned the permitted scheme.

Having inherited rather than designed the environmentally questionable extreme excavation meant that it could be appreciated for its sublime, dramatic beauty: a stunning twenty-metre-high sheer rock face of warm, mellow limestone, so characteristic of the island of Mallorca. The cut stone had a very different quality from the grizzled gray, exposed rock that led to the sea, weathered by the sea for millenia. But the cut still felt like a wound. A radical response was required. Rather than placing the new building against the exposed rock face as the original scheme proposed, a freestanding sculptural form was conceived, that unfolded into the site from the highest point of arrival to the level closest to the sea, inhabiting the volume of the original mountainous landscape. This gesture left the quarry wall rock-face exposed, a presence to visually define the interior.

Linear strands of hydroponic green make up a final layer, tying the structure back to the landscape along the profile of the original topography. This acts as both shading system and blurring device. Like magic, over time the building will dissolve back into the re-emerging form of the old rock, and the mountain will appear restored.

Location

Mallorca,

Spain

Date

2011

Status

Unbuilt

The site, within Europe, Spain, Mallorca, and the Formentor Peninsula

The transformation of the site:
1 – The virgin landscape slopes into the mediterranean sea and is covered with a lush layer of plants.
2 – A quarry-like site was inherited: the excavation was based on the previous architectural scheme by a local architect.
3 – The building, a sculptural spiral form, is inserted and connects the different levels of the existing quarry from the upper point of arrival to the pool at the lower end.
4 – Existing plateaux and the roof of the spiral are turned into usable outdoor space, and connect back to the existing landscape at various points.
5 – The mountain is conceptually ‘re-created’. Planting is introduced following the original topographical lines of the site, with strategic views out. The growth of the planted layer slowly envelopes the built form,
creating a secret sculpted cave of filtered sunlight, kept cool against the grand vertical cliff face.

The spiral is a terrazzo gradient which begins as a pure white, blank canvas in the sculptor’s studio at the start of the route, and which gradually transforms as the building unfolds, developing into a richly gleaming underwater artwork. The spiral is the core spatial strategy of the building and unites the architecture and the landscape in a seamless union. The private spaces are contained within the spiral. The public spaces are without, but are defined by this scuptural object; the public spaces are those beneath it, and between the spiral and rockface.

PROJECT TEAM

Architects – Skene Catling de la Peña & FAR Frohn & Rojas: Charlotte Skene Catling, Jaime de la Peña, Marc Frohn, Mario Rojas Toledo, Max Koch, Samuel Chisholm, Oliver Claussen, Theodora Bowering, Roo Humpherson, Danielle Rosman, Isabel Chua, Ruta Jakstaite, Lukas Mersch, Massimo Sean Pepe, Ulrike Stier, David Wischniewski, Steven Vidovic, Katharina Laekam
Collaborators & Consultants: Price & Meyers, Downie Consultants, Fernando Purroy, 3E Engineers, Christopher Knowlton Lighting