Within Brussels is a peripheral zone. A piece of landscape is within it - green, open, idyllic, as if we were in the fringes of the city (where it affects the forest). This condition, so particular, is easy to destroy.
To double the surface of a house, seemingly autonomous in this strange and luxuriant environment, it was decided to underline elegantly the existence of all which was already, to celebrate the status quo and to remove simultaneously the extension by making it extremely visible and so to make it the protagonist. The extension is created under the existing villa, without adding new volumes, but by creating its base. This base makes of the existing house an object in exhibition: maintained, cleaned, restored - undone of its initial importance. This one becomes then a night house, a ghost house over a new excavated villa. The villa is new and former then simultaneously. It is about a house conceived as a set of various spaces bounded by columns. The rhythm of column defined the plan and the sequences: a set of spaces the function of which is not defined. The villa appears as the vestige of a house; a set of tectonic elements which create various spatial hierarchies. Sometimes, spaces are open-air; sometimes they receive an indirect light. The structure, massive, is made by beams and by concrete columns, measured to have a maximal tectonic effect. It is translated in a spatial idea. Dice which we cross from the inside towards the outside, concrete columns become wooden columns tinged, creating then a space construction, a sequence of hypothetical places where to stay. The villa exists thus on this green island, maintained by its existence, an aware contribution to an urban fabric at the edge of the extinction. " - Kersten Geers David Van Severen
To double the surface of a house, seemingly autonomous in this strange and luxuriant environment, it was decided to underline elegantly the existence of all which was already, to celebrate the status quo and to remove simultaneously the extension by making it extremely visible and so to make it the protagonist. The extension is created under the existing villa, without adding new volumes, but by creating its base. This base makes of the existing house an object in exhibition: maintained, cleaned, restored - undone of its initial importance. This one becomes then a night house, a ghost house over a new excavated villa. The villa is new and former then simultaneously. It is about a house conceived as a set of various spaces bounded by columns. The rhythm of column defined the plan and the sequences: a set of spaces the function of which is not defined. The villa appears as the vestige of a house; a set of tectonic elements which create various spatial hierarchies. Sometimes, spaces are open-air; sometimes they receive an indirect light. The structure, massive, is made by beams and by concrete columns, measured to have a maximal tectonic effect. It is translated in a spatial idea. Dice which we cross from the inside towards the outside, concrete columns become wooden columns tinged, creating then a space construction, a sequence of hypothetical places where to stay. The villa exists thus on this green island, maintained by its existence, an aware contribution to an urban fabric at the edge of the extinction. " - Kersten Geers David Van Severen