Images © Ian Ritchie Architects
Ian Ritchie Architects
1998The 'greenhouse' Fragment for Terrasson-Lavilledieu, Dordogne
The brief for the inaugural SL Prize winner called for a visitor centre to complement the winning entry in a landscape competition, 'Paysage Land' by Kathryn Gustafson, the landscape artist who had recently become the inaugural winner of the Jane Drew Prize. The result is a greenhouse set into the hillside. Vertical cantilever walls are made of large local stones in steel-mesh frames or gabions. These support a roof featuring the world’s first application of an interglass fixing, which leaves a continuous outer surface, giving perfect reflections of the landscape around it: a virtual lake. The judges considered it ‘a wonderfully simple building which combines sophisticated glass architecture with the innovative use of rubble walls. It is a perfect counterpoint to the magical landscape by Kathryn Gustafson in which it sits.’
“The ‘Greenhouse’ Fragment is a composition with the natural topography of the park, seeking the sun from above the hill, and is spatially experienced from three distinct points of view within the park. It is seen tangentially to its roof surface of glass, appearing as a virtual lake, reflecting fragments of the town and distant and close landscapes. From below, its gently curving gabion stone wall suggests both the enclosure of space and the design management of the steeply sloping site; an earth stabilising principle being expressed as functional lines within other areas of the park. From within, the greenhouse is defined by the gabion wall and glass roof; the spatial experience of its volume and changing levels of light reveal the interplay of three performance areas - the lemon and orange tree promenade, a sunken exhibition/theatre and an information gallery. There is an architectural expression smooth versus rough, of sophisticated material processing and structural performance (the glass roof) juxtaposed with a relatively unprocessed and unsophisticated material (the gabion stone wall), levitas (light glass roof) and gravitas (mass of stone) and cool (glass) and warmth (stone). These two elements remain physically and structurally independent; though combine to create the microclimate of the greenhouse.”
Ian Ritchie Architects
