Description of project by Antón García-Abril
Hemeroscopium is the place for the Greeks where the sun sets. It is an allusion to a place that exists only in the senses, which moves and yet is a real place. It is bounded by the references of the horizon, by physical limits, defined by light and occurs in time.
The Hemeroscopium house traps a domestic space, and a distant horizon. And he does it with an exercise of unstable balance of structures that surrounds the room enclosure allowing the vision to escape. And it does it with heavy structures, in big strokes, so that its disposition provokes the gravitational action that moves the space, and thus defines the place.
The order of structural stacking generates a helicoid that starts from a stable support, the mother beam, to develop in an upward direction with lighter and lighter structures until closing the sequence with a point that culminates the equilibrium system. There are seven elements whose encounters respond to their constructive nature, to their demands, and their efforts express their structural condition. With this the house becomes aerial, light, transparent, and the space that has filled its interior revolves with life. The apparent simplicity of their encounters demands a complex engineering thanks to the assembly, and to the prestressing and post-tensioning of the steels that sew the soul of the beams. One year of engineering to build the structure in seven days, thanks to a total prefabrication of the parts and a mounting cadence perfectly coordinated by a technical script. All our effort to develop the technique in search of a specific space.
And so a surprising language emerges, where the form disappears giving way to the naked space. The Hemeroscopium house materializes the peak of its balance with what we at the Ensamble Studio ironically call the G-spot, twenty tons of granite, expression of the force of gravity and physical counterweight of its entire structure.
