A film about a house designed by Piers Taylor / Invisible Studio for himself in Greece. The House is low key, rooted in the ordinary and the everyday world of the surrounding shepherds huts and unfinished concrete and reinforcement bar buildings that evolve slowly over many years. The area that the house is in is still dominated by small scale agriculture and olive groves planted by the Venetians in the 17th century. The structure of the building is one move. The site is in an earthquake zone, fire danger zone, and there is limited material to build with other than reinforced concrete using local limestone aggregate - and making formwork is a key local skill. There are simple rooms contained within this main volume, made entirely from concrete (walls, floors, ceilings, kitchen, some furniture) and on top, a large shaded living space under a corrugated roof supported on red oxide reinforcement bar trusses, drawing very much on the skills and materials available locally.
There is no glass - only galvanised weldmesh sliding screens, separate sliding insect screens, and plastic curtains using cheap, vernacular materials available from the hardware store in the village. There are no designer inflections, nothing precious, nothing rarefied, and nothing (much) that suggests this is architecture. There is no gate, no fence, no taming of the landscape around it.
All of the ‘mistakes’ are evident - or rather, the processes and decisions made by the locals who made the building. The organisation of the formwork is eccentric, but has a logic and a language based around the materials they had, and the sequence in which they worked. Sometimes the formwork is horizonal, sometimes vertical, sometimes rough-hewn board that has been used many times, occasionally ply. Taylor wanted to see evidence of their process, not his. There are seed pods and olive stones in the concrete reflecting the seasons in which the locals worked. There has been a conscious attempt to make a house that is rooted in the materials, techniques and resources that exist in a small Greek island, existentially concerned with the loss of identify that comes from a multitude of ubiquitous and generic buildings that have been built here over the last 50 years since Taylor has been coming to this part of Greece.