TheForest Villa, located in the suburban town of Izabelin, surrounded by the Kampinos National Park, is a project by Barycz and Saramowicz Architectural Office. Situated among old-growth pine trees, the building combines tradition with modernism.
The design task the architects set themselves was to find such a shape and texture of the building that would allow it to fit into the landscape of the Kampinos National Park. An important element of the design is the combination of traditional oak shingles with gabion baskets filled with Libyan dolomite, which were used for the cyclopean wall.
The villa is located near the forest
© Biuro Architektoniczne Barycz i Saramowicz
villa surrounded by forest
TheForest Villa on the side of the road is a massive, simple wall with few openings - this is the facade that shields the actual part of the house, consisting of two wings. The private part of the villa surrounds an inner courtyard, which is an extension of the interior, allowing residents to interact with the forest surroundings.
first floor plan
© Barycz and Saramowicz Architectural Office
gabion cyclopean wall
The house is distinguished by the materials used. The front wall of the villa and the eastern side elevation were built from gabions - steel baskets, filled with stones. Although gabions appear in Polish buildings, they are mostly only a detail, and are rarely used as a building material.
The wall was made of gabions
© Biuro Architektoniczne Barycz i Saramowicz
As the architects say about the workmanship itself:
Making the cyclopean wall from gabions was a pioneering technical challenge. Stone baskets filled with ballast, Triassic stone from the deposit in Libiąż, of grain size 85 - 220 mm, were used. Gabions composed with precision were laid with dimensions: 50 cm; width 25 cm, locally 50 cm; length 150 cm, 100 cm and 75 cm, respectively. A wire thickness of 4.5 mm was adopted, with a mesh distance of 76.2×76.2 mm. For attaching the gabions, a specific cross-section of the external walls was determined, which were made of ceramic hollow blocks on the inside for the erection of single-layer masonry, then a structural layer of reinforced concrete was assumed, in order to suspend the masonry baskets from it. They were fixed with a 40 mm wide flat bar with band anchors with a spacing of 30 cm. The pullout resistance of such a connection is calculated to be 13.05 kN/mb. In the area of the lintels, a system of console supports was used. The lashing baskets created a kind of "wicker braid of stone" in place of the traditional building wall.
contrast between wood and stone
facade of stone and shingle
© Barycz and Saramowicz Architectural Office
The architects contrasted the gabions with shingles made of oak dranica, captivating the other facades of the house. Large expanses of glass windows, wood and stone are the hallmarks of the villa, which is integrated into the forest landscape. The building is a reflection of Rafal Barycz and Pawel Saramowicz's architectural philosophy, which reads:
The architecture of modern Poland in the 21st century must be avant-garde and hyper-modern, and at the same time distinct, not imitative, but drawing on its own history and tradition. For it grows out of culture and builds its identity in relation to it.
Read also about another realization by the Barycz and Saramowicz Architectural Office - a villa made of shingles and concrete which received the Stanislaw Witkiewicz Award of the Malopolska Region in 2012.
compiled by: Dobrawa Bies
illustrations courtesy of the Barycz and Saramowicz Architectural Office
