Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel and Partners

about ACPV

architecture
interiors
design
Private house
Basel - Switzerland - 2004

This house is inhabited by a young, large family which doesn’t lead a typically bourgeois life. Children are at the heart of daily life, with their timetable, their needs, their pace.
Therefore, in the framework of a rather complex and well-articulated project, it was important for the building – with its geometries and its way of establishing relations with the surrounding environment – to show these features.
Two organisational principles characterise the design. 
As for the plan, the nearly square shape of the house makes all the corridors run around an inner courtyard so as to perceive the movements and the relations between inhabitants at each time of the day.
In cross-section, the communal space devoted to the social life of the family is entirely transparent towards the garden and, as a sort of glass spacer, it keeps two solid volumes separate: bedrooms on the first floor and the area for sports activities and home services in the basement.
The peculiar construction of the building with its double insulated concrete layer has made it possible to use an elementary language, with no finishes, where only the use of colour in the large sliding screen panels of the façade, but also inside, in the daytime area, clearly provides evidence of a strongly graphic overall design.