Elastic House

Alt. Corp. was established in 2018 at the initiative of architects Cosmin O. Gălățianu, Cosmin Georgescu, Cristian Beșliu, Octavian Bîrsan, and Andrei Theodor Ioniță. The co-founders of this group graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at IMUAU Bucharest.

There is a sense of generosity when thinking about botanical gardens, especially those that seem to impart a sense of gracious engagement with surrounding urban environment. It’s a curious condition that such abundance of plant species can find its place right in the heart of densely packed urban centers. Strong limits, streets, walls or natural elements, give the impression of clear borders, an enveloping boundary that gives shape and makes such gardens seem more like courtyards at the scale of a city. In this case, our proposal ponders upon the shifting nature of scale as it becomes an instrument of proximity and an agent of concurrence for those that are contained within. This “elastic” device not only informs one’s mechanism of perception, but also manipulates the meaning of spaces, places, and architecture itself. One can imagine a house as a long continuous room devoid of inner walls or partitions, an uninterrupted and simultaneously present loop and, ultimately, an open space par excellence. However, this openness is not to be seen as being disruptive when referring to functional aspects, but rather as an occasion for paradoxical cohabitations. Should such a lack of subdivisions make this be a lesser house? By means of distorting and stretching the very fabric of the plan, scale turns into an alibi as distance surprisingly generates a sense of intimacy. Every room settles in its own place on this orbital trajectory of living. The shift in scale can also be measured in time, similar to a clock dial whose full loop is equal to a day of living inside; moreover, it could be suggested that someone could be able to tell the time just by knowing where the house’s inhabitant is located. This curious contortion could even change everyday interactions, mundane questions like “Where is the bathroom?” can translate to “How long until the bathroom?”. Considering the fact that architecture always tends to take possession of its surrounding natural environment, it is not a mere coincidence that the 1:10 scale model of this house colonizes the pond found inside the botanical garden, in front of the Ethnographic Museum of Zürich, a place exploring the limit between the banal contemplation of nature and the scientific exigence of dendrology. Finally, a final act of distortion is implied by the fact that a majestic pond is transformed into a courtyard, a courtyard at the scale of a botanical garden.