Flint House by Skene Catling De La Peña

Description of the project by Skene Catling de la Peña

The site is a curious linear island isolated within the context of a large estate. It is a strange, still place; an anomoly of wilderness within its highly cultivated agricultural context.

The building has a rawness that echoes the landscape, jutting from the ground like a collision of tectonic plates, a man-made mountain that follows the profile of the existing trees. The landscape and architecture are inextricably linked, and the form is sculpted using layers of natural materials found there: flint and chalk with inclusions of concrete, glass and metal. The architecture becomes an optical device, at once a platform, frame and lens for viewing the surrounding landscape and context.

There is a material transformation over the building where at its base it appears to be almost ripped raw from the ground before it undergoes a ‘civilizing process’ as it progresses into the uppermost ethereal chalk layer where it finally dissolves into the sky. It embodies the idea of the geological extrusion, infinite age and of revealing something already there. This was the fundamental generator for the design, and carries through from the form itself into the materiality and final detail. The site is inextricably bound to the building at all levels.

Flint house is aligned along the central spine of the north-south axis and becomes a means of calibrating the site, making the range of site conditions readable. It becomes an ‘atmospheric thermometer’ where the building itself measures, reflects and makes legible the range of different atmospheres there, from the darker, introverted north-east, embedded in the tallest trees, through moss, ferns and lichens to the exposed centre. Stripes or bands of different landscape developed diagrammatically in response to an initial analysis. Over the relatively small space of the site, levels of water, light and shading vary dramatically, which is reflected in the plants that have taken root over time.

The building is conceived of materially as a flint landscape that has been carved away to become habitable. Wherever the main body has been cut or sculpted, such as the roof and balconies, the surface becomes terrazzo. The colour of the terrazzo is carefully graded to follow the progression of the flint. The flint was chosen for its rawness, to read like a Keifer painting of ash and lead, or the paint strokes of an Auerbach. The texture of the building answers the rough clods of ploughed earth in the surrounding fields. The flint is graded from a coarse, oily black, rusticated base to a refined fading out of powdery, smooth chalk.