Introduction to the Villa Bordeaux - Project One Arch1202

The Villa Bordeaux, or the Maison a Bordeaux, is a private domicile designed by OMA/ Rem Koolhaas.
The project was commissioned in 1994 and completed in 1998 at the behest of a family living in Bordeaux, France.

The Site:
The building plot is located 5km from Bordeaux's city centre. The plot is located on a hill, providing a 180 degree view of the city and the nearby river.


The Brief:
The client - the family - had recently experienced a tragedy with the disabling of the father in a terrible car accident. Confined to a wheel chair and will limited mobility, the clients sought a building that provided new freedoms to the disabled client, while still providing for the needs of the other family members and still ensuring a stimulating, pleasurable environment for those inside.

The Design:

The opportunities provided by the site, in combination with  the challenges facing the clients persuaded the designer, Rem Koolhaas, to pursue a 'flying' villa. The house provide a new freedom of movement and access to the clients, unleashing the full potential of the building and the environments.


The Engineer:

In order to help him realize a structurally challenging design, Koolaas turned to a long-time collaborator - engineer Cecil Balmond. Balmond was tasked with giving wings to a 'box' - a private domain to be perched on top of open, glazed living area on the floor below, which is itself set on top of a partially buried ground floor.

The building's central design issue  concerns the levitation of a large mass - the second floor. Creating a lightness in the building, notes Balmond (Informal, 2002) is not a particularly novel problem in architecture. The key, then, was to find a way to lift the top floor without resorting to heavy structural solutions of the constrains of convention. Balmond points out that the Villa Savoye, while an elegant example of lightness, still does not escape the convention of being lifted into the air on legs - not unlike a table.

But with the setting on the hill - Koohaas and Balmond have a position that defies the security of a stable, conventional configuration. Instead, they conceive of a building perched atop a hill ready to launch.

Ultimately, Balmond's solution to the problem of levitation is to break the symmetry of the building in order to create a dynamism within the structure - to make it lift off. The asymmetry creates a tension, and instability that prods and pokes at the building's balance and creates a sense of momentum within the building.  Specifically, the buildings supports will be flipped in elevation - on top hung and one bottom hung. In addition, the energy of the building is reinforces by side-ways shifts in the plan and the distribution of the load - pulling one way and then another. The plans and sections of the building demonstrate the defiance of the building in the face of gravity and.

The core:

In order to restore structural stability to the house, Balmond devises a core for the building - a shaft that rises through the three floors and encloses a spiral staircase. In order to avoid a perception of stability, the core is offset on the building. Yes, the offset requires another solution in order to keep the building from tipping over. A counter weight was added to the building - a cable suspended from an beam laid across the roof. The cable tethers the building to the ground.
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The 'box' - top floor: 


 The mass of the building is found in the top floor of the building, which contains the family's bedrooms. The walls of the top floor allows for privacy, but they also create perspectives - with small portholes cut into the walls at different heights and vantage points for the different family members. The walls themselves also provide a structural function. There are cuts in both the roof and floor slabs - to accommodate sliding glass walls, a moving platform for the wheelchair- bound client as well as light wells and open space/ This creates more challenges for the transmission of the building's load. The upper floor walls also then act as horizontal ties.

On top of the roof, a girder bears the weight  of the building through a top hang - created through rods buried in the concrete walls.


The first floor:

The majority of the public space is found on the open-plan, heavily glazed,  indoor-outdoor first floor.The largely uninterrupted space on the middle floor creates

both an opening to the natural environments, and makes the top floor appear to be floating -  a flyng box.


Ground floor:

The ground floor of the building is partially buried in the earth of the hill, with an entry to the courtyard on the other side. The buried nature of the bottom floor further enhances the notion of the building lifting away from the earth - as it the building is lifting right out of the landscape. of the building. It is notable that the complex configuration of the three levels does not pose a a problem of the disabled client. The rising wheelchair platforms allows the building to come to the clients. The shaft of the  platform also creates a visual and spatial contrast to the tubular core of the building on the opposite end of the building.