205: Holding the Ground
Seven works on building as a way of staying put, from a Mexican lakeshore hut to a Norwegian crematorium folded into forest.
Barboza Blanco Office sets a single pitched volume low against a rural lake in Mexico, almost a hut. The roof does the work. The issue gathers structures that hold their ground in this register: small in plan, certain in mass, drawn to the specific weight of where they stand.
HW Studio’s Kehai House works a concrete shell around an open void, registering presence without performance. In Mantova, Archiplan strips an eighteenth-century rural building back to lime and cotto. Tamada and Wakimoto make the entire dwelling out of a single folded roof in Japan. Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk folds a mortuary into the dark concrete of a Norwegian forest, the architecture of grief reduced to a low horizon. Sarker Protick’s three series fold landscape, infrastructure and atmosphere into one accumulated reading of land as history. Lena Becerra’s vessels treat blood as material, the body again, but here as something the building outlasts.
From DwellWell: On the banks of the River Tay near Cupar, Scotland, Barboza Blanco rebuilds a roofless stone shell into a one-person riverside dwelling, the timber felled from the forest directly behind it.
From Casa Mexicana: On the outskirts of Morelia, Michoacán, HW Studio builds Kehai House, its founder Rogelio Vallejo Bores’ own residence organised around a stone garden rather than a room.
From DwellWell: In the Po Valley flatlands of Gazzo Bigarello, Italy, Archiplan Studio builds Casa GA from prefabricated concrete panels — a house that reinterprets the elementary rural forms of this agricultural landscape.
Architecture across Japan — from Tadao Ando’s concrete temples to the micro-houses of Tokyo, from Kengo Kuma’s timber structures to Kazuyo Sejima’s transparent volumes. A country where spatial compression becomes poetry and gardens dissolve the line between inside and out. A growing collection.
From Sacral Journey: In Asker, Norway, Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk AS adds a 100-square-metre mortuary to a late-1950s crematorium chapel, a barrel vault of load-bearing white clay brick over the ceremony room.
From DwellWell: In Tochigi, Japan, Tamada & Wakimoto Architects builds Roof House around a single thin roof extended across multiple separated volumes — turning the space between buildings into a series of semi-outdoor gardens that belong equally to interior and exterior.
From Climax: Across Bangladesh’s Padma floodplains and the coal pits of Jaintiapur, Sarker Protick photographs Leen, Jirno, Awngar, and Mr. & Mrs., four series built on the discipline of listening.
At Acéfala Gallery in Buenos Aires, Lena Becerra presents COAGVLA, a sculptural installation of glass, stainless steel and silicone that holds matter in the liminal state between dissolution and recomposition.
