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Event: Three Houses, One Skyscraper and a Chair; a lecture by Fran Silvestre
Location: Center for Architecture, 03.28.12
Speakers: Fran Silvestre
Introductions: Rick Bell, FAIA, and Inigo Ramirez de Haro Valdes, Consulate General of Spain
Organizer: The Center for Architecture
Sponsors: Spain Arts & Culture and Spain Culture New York
Fran Silvestre presents his recent work at the Center for Architecture.
Nicole Friedman
Spanish architect Fran Silvestre’s lecture detailed the philosophy of his studio in relation to each of five projects. He is very much a local architect: each of the white-on-white buildings are in or around Valencia, the architect’s home base, and attempt to balance the desire to enhance existing natural beauty with economic austerity.
This frugality at the core of Silvestre’s young practice gives the Casa Del Antilado its form: a single cube levitating over the rocky terrain of the Spanish countryside. The design was largely driven by the expense of excavating the rocky site. Instead, the architect chose not to level the ground, but rather to hover over it. The completed concrete frame was lowered onto stilts, both embracing and transcending the local environment while creating the ideal vantage point from which to admire it.
The desire to transcend creeps up again in the design of the House on the Castle Mountainside. Sited against a striking backdrop of the picturesque Iberian countryside and historic villages, Silvestre saw his task as one of overcoming the beauty of the surroundings to stand on its own. The weekend home thus took on the fragmented geometry of the surrounding landscape and reinterpreted it within the studio’s own vernacular, standing, as the architect suggests, “somewhere in between history and innovation,” inventing only where needed.
Silvestre’s work emphasizes the importance of economy, both in design and in construction. Just as in his built projects, his proposal for a chair seeks to find a form by understanding the object’s life-cycle and inventing new efficiencies within it. Made of a single sheet of aluminum, the form is cut with only five incisions and bent to shape. The resulting thin silhouette suggests that the object is on the verge of disappearing: an expression that is very much at the core of designer’s intention. The design is as concerned with the object’s efficiency in life, as in production: the chairs stack snuggly and vertically for storage, as the designer observed that the greatest cost of objects is incurred long after they have been made.
Maryana Grinshpun is a designer based in New York.