by Olivia Martin
Architect’s Newspaper, Feb 25, 2016
(Image: OE House in Alforja, Spain. Photo: Jose Hevia)
For clients who wanted two separate houses, one for the first floor and one for the ground floor, they couldn’t have found a better architectural match than in Fake Industries Architectural Agonism. Headed up by Cristina Goberna and Urtzi Grau, the New York–based firm is constantly exploring new approaches to architecture. One of Grau and Goberna’s theories is on expanding the possibilities of replicating and copying architecture, and they have written a monograph on the topic: Architectural Replicas: Four Hypotheses on the Use of Agonistic Copies in the Architectural Field.
As a result, the OE House in Alforja, Spain, is a mash-up of a Case Study house on the ground floor with Le Corbusier’s Maison Jaoul on top. The Case Study house is for summer use while Maison Jaoul is for winter. It is, as Fake Industries puts it, an architectural “exquisite corpse.” The clients wanted to be able to completely close off one “house” and then move to the other “house,” depending on the season and their current needs. “There are two different ideas of domesticity,” Grau said. “The sense of enclosure [on the upper level] and a traditional Catalan rural style of home, then the airy Case Study on the ground floor that has a relationship to the outside and the landscape.” Read more…