Veronica Dolina had a "summer cottage that flew". Well, this one went. It looks exactly like a small country house made of typical panel boards, door-window-roof. But it is designed as a constructor in order to turn into a parallelepiped and dive onto a truck. With a loader crane. But without a construction crew and, since the house is hinged, it folds and unfolds in three hours.
The house shown is a prototype of the range of folding houses from the Latvian company Brette Haus.
The device, like the exterior of the house, is quite simple: one module - the living room - is motionless; when folded, the unit with a kitchen, a shower and a staircase rises, "entering" the frame of the walls of the living room, since its volume is slightly smaller in width. Then both volumes are "covered" by the second floor, and the asymmetric shape of the roof, as well as undercutting along the edges, is explained by this very need. They put it on concrete slabs without a foundation.
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zooming 1/7 Installation. Klintis Nature Reserve. Brette 20 (Brette A22) © Brette Haus
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zooming 2/7 Brette 20 at the Dzirnavu pirtina campsite. Installation. Brette 20 (Brette A22) © Brette Haus
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zooming 3/7 Plan of the 1st floor. Brette 20 (Brette A22) © Brette Haus
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zooming 4/7 Plan of the 2nd floor. Brette 20 (Brette A22) © Brette Haus
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zooming 5/7 Facade. Brette 20 (Brette A22) © Brette Haus
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zooming 6/7 Facade. Brette 20 (Brette A22) © Brette Haus
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zooming 7/7 Section. Brette 20 (Brette A22) © Brette Haus
The house was assembled at a factory from LCT panels, in December 2019 it was installed for the winter in the Klintis nature reserve on the Baltic Sea, in the summer we carried out the first cycle of transportation to the Dzirnavu camping pirtina, where it was rented out through booking and airbnb. In the reserve, it looked excellent and contrasting next to a sweeping mossy barn, which seems to be typical of a Baltic farm.
The house, as already mentioned, is very simple outside and inside. It could even be understood as a kind of quintessence of a panel cottage, it is both laconic and bright, in the shown prototype it is red; the windows are small, and those that are larger are similar in proportion to the windows of typical panel series. The asymmetry of the roof works not so much for a plastic gesture as for the curvature of the silhouette. Looking at this house, it is difficult to get rid of the thought that you want to somehow "draw" it, or something.
But the value is not in the aesthetic component, of course, but in the experiment. This is how, for example, J. R. Tolkien wrote that the hobbits must be understood. In fact, the red house looks great in the pastoral Baltic landscape, almost asks even for a picture of "little Dutchmen" with cows and peasants (but even more for a picture with Malevich's peasants). The house itself is so small: laconic, a little awkward, but, like the hobbits, "with a secret." It is not so simple in a plastic sense either: take the steps of a staircase, for example? installed at alternating angles in a sterile wood interior. The authors talk about 90% of the tree in the house in general.
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zooming 1/9 Brette 20 in the Klintis Nature Reserve. Brette 20 (Brette A22) © Brette Haus
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zooming 2/9 Brette 20 at the Dzirnavu pirtina campsite. Brette 20 (Brette A22) © Brette Haus
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zooming 3/9 Brette 20 at Klintis Nature Reserve. Brette 20 (Brette A22) © Brette Haus
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zooming 4/9 Brette 20 in the Klintis Nature Reserve. Interior. Brette 20 (Brette A22) © Brette Haus
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zooming 5/9 Brette 20 in the Klintis Nature Reserve. Interior. Brette 20 (Brette A22) © Brette Haus
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zooming 6/9 Brette 20 in the Klintis Nature Reserve. Interior. Brette 20 (Brette A22) © Brette Haus
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zooming 7/9 Brette 20 in the Klintis Nature Reserve. Interior. Brette 20 (Brette A22) © Brette Haus
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zooming 8/9 Brette 20 in the Klintis Nature Reserve. Brette 20 (Brette A22) © Brette Haus
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zooming 9/9 Brette 20 at the Dzirnavu pirtina campsite. Installation. Brette 20 (Brette A22) © Brette Haus
But what's interesting: we (talking about myself) used to think of the super-foldable house as something futuristic, like a spaceship that lands not on concrete slabs with wooden supports to level the terrain, but on slender metal legs with a hydraulic drive. and maybe even better. And here a wooden country house tries on a futuristic role, and this is, to put it mildly, unexpected - again, just like those hobbits who saved the world. I remember a spaceship-watering can, hidden in a dacha (admittedly near Moscow) in one of Dmitry Bykov's books.
It is clear that experiments in this area have been going on for 60 years, they have achieved a lot, for example, automatic deployment in 5 minutes. Or for 10. Totan Kuzembaev built a transforming house with Gary Chang (although it turned out not very transformer) in Pirogovo. On the other hand - maybe this is how it looks, the future? Not like the Futuro house (by the way, it is also prefabricated, in Russia - in the Dombai mountains), but as a country house that wished to cope? Indeed, in this case we are dealing with a kind of domestication of the futuristic idea of a transforming house.
The minimum area of the Brette A22 house is 22 m, the building area is 15 m2, the price is 2 million, if you count in rubles. The developers offer it as a mobile country house, a hotel element or an option for a stall at a temporary fair. The house was presented at ArchiWOOD 2020 and was among the nominees.
video clip about the project
