CASA TERMINAL 1

The client of this house is a helicopter pilot. “I like everything that flies”. He wants the construction to be emotionally intense, like the sensation of flying. It is an uneasy, unstable, risky situation: freedom and lightness but, at the same time, the evidence of inescapable gravity, of the possibility of falling. Living on a borderline, a frontier between floating in the air or crashing. A subtle but vital separation.

The client approaches another desire: he wants a house made of concrete, entirely. The house arises from these two requirements. From the manifestation of the material to close a large space, from its struggle against gravity. The house is a concrete shell suspended at its ends and enveloping abstract volumes inside.

This categorical nature makes the construction a landmark in the landscape of the Camiral Golf & Wellness, near Girona, where it is located. Its presence is unavoidable, causing admiration and curiosity. Is it a house or a golf facility? The client gives it a very airport-like name: Terminal 1.

Terminal 1 seats at the top of a double plot, central within the golf resort. Behind it, the original cork oak forest remains, and in front of it is a large garden with visual continuity towards the holes of the Tour Course. Despite its artificial condition, or perhaps because of it, it stands naturally among the grey holm oak groves. In the misty winter mornings, it has something of a cromlech, a megalithic table, a primitive monument.

The house is an infrastructure but wants to be cosy. The staircase of the spaces is sublime but at the same time measured. Its organisation is functional: a ramped promenade to access under the entrance porch; a ground floor with the daytime spaces and a lower wing with the night-time spaces. The rooms and bathrooms are organised within the black volumes which jealously guard the records of the most private life of their occupants.

The materials qualify the spaces with their expressiveness: the ordered grid of the formwork, smooth walls bathed in the grazing light of the skylights, lightly polished concrete floors, continuous cladding of the black boxes in continuity between inside and outside, or the warmth of walnut wood and glazed ceramics. Grandiose yet friendly and stimulating spaces to reclaim the emotion of architecture through space and light.