2verandas by Gus Wüstemann // Zürich, Switzerland.

To Switzerland, today, to look at a wonderful (enormous) house on the northern shores of Lake Zürich. The house is by Gus Wüstemann Architects. The photographs are by Bruno Helbling.

In the run-up to his ‘Plain Space’ exhibition at the London Design Museum a few years ago, I heard John Pawson on BBC Radio 4 answering a question about what lies behind his minimalist approach. His simple response went along the lines of ‘well… there’s not much that I like’. I get the sense that there’s not an awful lot that the team at Gus Wüstemann Architects like to specify either, if this bluff, muscular concrete house is anything to go by.

But I like it a lot.

I’m currently working on a mainly-concrete house, so my fascination with projects like this is professionally slavish.

The building comprises two houses – one of concrete, one of wood – at opposite ends of a large suburban plot. The design intent was to occupy the entire site and draw people through the garden by giving them a destination. I like this very much. The garden becomes somewhere to be, rather than something to look at. The residence (concrete) is up high. The pool house (timber) sits below. The former is a sort of glamorous bunker one can live in. The latter an airy rectilinear folly for outdoor braais on those long summer evenings of the northern hemisphere.

I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over my first glimpse of that picture of the living room in Tadao Ando’s Koshino House, as a witless architecture student. The alchemical relationship of concrete and light, in which the simple becomes sublime. I am subsequently predisposed to love these spare, monastic living spaces. Not a lot of furniture is needed as the seats are built in. Not a lot of set dressing is required because the light scraping along the gnarled surfaces of the concrete is beauty enough. Massive punched-out holes in the walls frame views to the distant lake, or form skylights over insidey-outsidey rooms.

Internal partitions are objects in space, able to be viewed in the round as one would a piece of sculpture. Kitchen and bathroom fittings partake of the massive, elemental quality seen in the macro parts of the house. The materials palette is spare but within the concrete, travertine and timber there is a richness when the right kind of daylight creeps in to caress it.

This isn’t a house for the faint-hearted, and heaven knows where one is supposed to hang the family photos.

But what wonderful space has been made.

Ende.

–Luke.