Territorial Agency

The Horizon House . Private house . plot 39 . Ordos

source: Territorial Agency . ordosproject

Ordering systems always imply an opposite: systems of disorder. The architecture of this new house in Ordos is a collection of different spaces, an interlocking of intimate and open spaces that form a vertical house at the edge of the new settlement. Its architecture organizes and disassembles the various activities that will inhabit it. The architecture of the tower allows to have a different configuration on each floor, a system of vertical divisions and separations that enhances the polyphony of its intimate spaces.

The division of the various activities at the different levels, arranged as succession of equivalent horizontal spaces, is shuffled by a set of intersections that link them diagonally and vertically. Joining two opposite vertices of the sharp geometry of the tower, the intimacy of the master bedroom and the area for banquets and dinners, a slanting cavity crosses the entire volume of the tower. It cuts through the order of the horizontal planes of the different floors and refracts the sunlight from the southern façade to the depths of the northern walls, some 12 meters below.

This prismatic device opens the house to a new dynamic: one of connections and unexpected links. Points on different planes and surfaces are optically intersected by this diagonal space, which reorganizes the house following different rationales. It generates a complex internal topography that reverberates in the other intersecting space, the vertical void of the library. A major space in the house, the library is an archive that treasures also its inner ordering system of vertical repetition.