Project one- Bordeaux House Final Submission.

Maison a Bordeaux

Rem Koolhaas 

The Bordeaux house designed by Rem Koolhaas is located in the suburb of Bordeaux, France. The client of this house was suffered from a car accident and he has to rely on a wheelchair. As the requirements of the client that he does not want a straightforward house rather a complex house which the house is define his entire world. Thus, Koolhaas proposed a rather simple volume that was spatially complex and innovative in terms of the interior organization and conditions.

The house is like a staking of three house, which are a a basement floor curved in hill, a completely transparent open ground floor and a private house enclosed by massive concrete facade on the top floor. Blow the a set of drawing showing the plans and sections.

Abstraction Studies

Private & Public

One of the most distinction of the this house is the way that koolhaas separate the private and public. As can be seen from the drawing below, the guest room has been separate from the master living space by the central courtyard, therefore the master living space can be considered as the private space when compare which the guest room. At master living space, the space can be breakdown into there different type, semi private space: basement level which half curved in to hill and half enclosed by glass panel; public space which is on the ground level which is half outside and half enclosed by large glass panel; private space which is the top floor enclosed by massive concrete wall and protected openings. I chose a range of colour, form light to dark showing the different level of privacy. I separated the public space into two part: indoor public space which enclosed by glass panel and outdoor public space which in totally opened up, those two spaces are represented by two different level of colours.

 Circulation

The circulation of Bordeaux house can been separated into vertical circulation and horizontal circulation. There are 4 set of staircase of this house, but here I mainly focus on two of them which are the most represent parts, they are the platform elevator and the circular staircase.I used light to highlight those 2 circulation and.
For the horizontal circulation, I removed all the walls just leave the circulation spaces, then its clear see where could go within the spaces.
The space of this house are separated into two part by its horizontal circulation, which the two part of space ( one for parents and one for children) are connected by really narrow path in between. Each space has its own entrance and vertical staircase or elevator.

Structural Strategy 

The model I made is simply the scheme of the house and showing the structural component of bordeaux house. The structural strategy of this house is the key-point to achieve several elements, such as the appearance of floating. The Upper level massive volume is supported by several structural elements as can be seen from the model. I chose black colour represent as a heavy concrete volume and trying to show that the the house appear as floating due the highlighted s structural component.