Gaspar House travel tips and stories. Vacations ideas, cruises, spa and resorts

The famous Madrid architect Alberto Campo Baeza creates particularly elegant buildings that play with the special relationship between air and light, focusing on continuity with natural elements and landscape. The Gaspar house has an 18 x 18 metre square floor plan, divided into equal parts, of which only the middle one is covered. This portion of the house is divided into three areas: a central area twice as large as the other two and one metre higher, and two lateral service areas. At the points where the high and low areas come together are windows measuring 2 X 2 metres.This is a highly simplified geometric configuration; its simplicity is emphasised by the glass surfaces and white paint.

In designing the building the Spanish architect turned to the tradition of Greek temple architecture, with a horizontal plane and a sort of podium on which the temple rested, its portico acting as a filter through which to observe the landscape.In the Gaspar house, as in the majority of Baeza’s works, the most evident feature is the strong presence of nature: the lemon trees in the courtyard, the pools of water reflecting vegetation, the transparency of the glass and the white walls. And, to create continuity between nature and the construction, between indoors and out, the entire house is paved in stone, which continues on either side of the glass.

There is a strong relationship between open and closed space, between white and light, between the built and the natural. The whiteness of the walls increases the homogeneity of the home, with a dual symmetry accentuated by the position of four lemon trees standing in the four corners of the courtyard.

In the Gaspar house Alberto Campo Baeza explicitly states his idea that architecture must inevitably take into account elements such as context, function and composition, but is exclusive or essential when it comes to form.This is not true minimalism, connected with given stylistic prerogatives, but rather an essentiality capable of representing the idea on the basis of expressive poetics.