House RP / Forte Architetti

From the architect. Located in the easteren part of Sicily, within a lemon grove overlooking the Ionian sea on one side, and Etna volcano on the other one, House RP stands in a marvellous location named Reitana. This place is known for the dominance of signs that underline its originary rural vocation: the lavastone drywalls, the rural buildings scattered in the landscape, the terraces modeling the country profile. All elements that draw a unique mediterranean landscape.

The design provides a family house integrated with a farm; the design itself takes shape form the variation of the theme of Masseria. The italian “masseria” is a vernacular mediterranean architecture characterized by the centric planimetric layout settled all around a courtyard named “corte”.
According with the brief we have designed a cluster system of buildings generated by the intersections of stunning views and their relations with the landscape. The outcome of this process is an amazing, yet natural, courtyard, core of the family’s life where the building acts as scenography for every day activities. Units  – both volumetric and functional typified  – are connected by key elements that acts as filters and services  spaces providing on a contraction of the rhythm of composition. These elements estabilsh a level of transparency that, for a moment in the inner promenade through the house, dissolve the boundary between inside and outside.

The gabled roof, made of metal sheets, unifies the parts of the composition and defines a skyline that becomes a landmark: a clear, geometrical, linear sign of the human presence within the silence of the rural paysage of mountain Etna.

The project breaks up with a conventional approach to the local traditional architecture to encourage the sperimentation of the modern language in its relationship with timeless values: nature, human spaces, genius loci are conceived as the deep meaning of our architecture.