Casa Lasso

View of living area.

Project details

• Project Name: Casa Lasso
• Project Type: Residential
• Principal Designer/s: Julio Salcedo
• Design Team: Michael Chen, Jane Kim, Inigo Cores
• Contractor/s: Construcciones Mazcuerras
• Date of commencement of project :2002
• Date of completion of project:2004
• Location of site: Trasierra (Cantabria), Spain
• Site Area: 2700 sq mts
• Built-up Area: 180 sq mts
• Cost of Construction/Execution: 460,000 euros

View of dining area.

Words from the Designer

Casa Lasso, a 170 m2 structure, completed in 2004, is located near the small village of Trasierra in Cantabria, about 40 miles from the city of Santander. Emerging from a windswept former cornfield overlooking the Gulf of Biscay, Casa Lasso intertwines the built structure and the landscape. The structure becomes the nexus of the graceful occupation and habilitation of the site. This occupation takes the geometry of a figure 8 as it aligns itself with the site's longest diagonal and the reigning winds.

The techniques of design arise from this nexus in the landscape. The structure is composed about a series of hinges or vertical axis at the moment of crossing. These techniques defy and reject standard projective techniques such as elevations / facades in favor for a non-projective composition about the axis and the space in between. In turn, these techniques propose a new typological approach to domestic models; rather than central or lineal typologies, Casa Lasso defines a new model for cohabitation through the open quadrants of this nexus.

View of interior stair.

Perceptually, Casa Lasso relies both in the figure 8 as well as in the "quadrant / hinge" techniques. As one moves through the figure 8, it is not that there is an "architectural promenade vis-a-vis a complementary system" as much as there is a totalizing environ for perception of landscape and structure. Additionally, the "quadrant / hinge" techniques only make precise what already happens when approaching a multi-axial construct as they construct an oblique environ.

View of south-western quadrant, at night.

Casa Lasso's program is a single-family part time residence composed of four bedrooms, bathrooms, living room, dining room and kitchen. Additionally, there was an equally demanding internally motivated program: the client family was fragmented and the house invested in new social relationships - hence the distribution of paired bedrooms, and communal spaces about the exterior quadrants-. The plan allows for a high degree of collective and individual enterprises: While the project is a continuous ribbon - one big lasso - the public wings face each other at less than 90 degrees so that you can partake of each other activities; the bedroom wings, however, distant themselves from the both the public and the other bedroom wings. In a similar fashion, the garden and main entrances provide either the option of being seen or quietly disappearing into the bedrooms.

View of northern quadrant.

Casa Lasso is a concrete structure with thermal masonry in-fills and a local stone cladding. The millwork is anodized aluminum with insulated glass. The interior floors are from a local chestnut farm. Some interior components are lacquered in three different colors.

Credits

• Text by Julio Salcedo
• Photographs by Miguel de Guzman, Courtesy of Julio Salcedo Design