The project brief asked for a pavilion that could serve a multitude of uses, from a pool house to housing a family of four, to hosting a dinner party among friends and family. The pavilion also had to conform to very strict size constraints: the client’s parents live on the property and this is considered a secondary dwelling, which in turn means that it could have a footprint no larger than fifty square meters and a mezzanine of twenty square meters.
As terrasses do not factor in the building footprint calculations, we used the broadly defined rules to our advantage. We surrounded the house with a copious amount of terraces such that they became a sort of envelope to the house. By moving the mezzanine over one of the terrasses, we maximize the interior volume and create a stronger sense of privacy between the spaces.
We programmed the terrasses to have specific functions: a sunken fire-pit for the cooler nights, a gallery that links all the spaces and serves as a bridge to the pond, and a covered exterior dining that can open to the main spaces to create a larger room when the weather is pleasant.
We think, or hope, that this pavilion is a good expression of minimal architecture: that the constraints in the end served the project and its manifestation on the site. Rather than a mere glass box detached from the landscape, the perimeter of the pavilion is porous and invites the users to interact with the architecture in a different way when facing the passage of time.
