Inspiring home of the week: Curved concrete in Crete

A gaping hole which doubles-up as a roof terrace is among the unique features of a new home built for a young family on the Greek island of Crete.

The four storey home in the city of Herkalion overlooks the ocean and the urban landscape. It features an elegant concrete facade with sculptural curves, punctured walls and a cantilever roof.

Tense Architecture Network, the practice behind the home resting on a monolithic wall, wanted to offer the residents shade from the Mediterranean sun. Cleverly positioned openings and slits on the facade sees the south-facing building play with the intense sunlight. On the first floor, an angled glass wall floods the living and dining area with light.

The home also blurs the boundaries between indoors and outdoors. As well as a roof doubling up as a terrace, residents can look out onto their outdoor pool from behind a glass wall.

The home has four bedrooms, including two which open out onto a private garden.

We spoke to Tilemachos Andrianopoulos, an architect at Tense Architecture Network, about what he wanted to achieve with the building

Please tell us a little about your practice

Tense Architecture Network was founded in 2004, as a network of collaborators and works of architecture. Athens based, the practice is currently structured around a core of four architects and an equivalent number of assistants. Public space and private housing are constantly researched in our work; the two fields are purposely interconnected.

What is your practice known for?

The practice’s work includes first prize competition proposals as well as several awarded residences. Residence in Sikamino was shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture, Mies van der Rohe Award 2013, while residences in Megara and Heraklion were nominated for the same award in 2015 and 2017. The residence in Kifissia was awarded a special mention by the Hellenic Association of Architects and Residence in Megara received the Häuser Award 2016, as one of the three best houses in Europe for last year.

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How would you sum with the project in five words?

This residential work is a sculptural answer to the bright Cretan sun.

What was the brief for this project?

Located in a quiet new neighbourhood of the Mediterranean city of Heraklion, not far frοm the city’s center, the house was designed to cover the needs of a young couple and their two small children. Developing in four levels, its secluded ground floor hosts the sleeping quarters, while the living quarters are placed at the extroverted ground floor.

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What did you hope to solve as you designed this home?

The Cretan sun is intensely bright. The flat, elevated corner plot offers views of the city and has an absolute southern orientation. The house would necessarily unfold along the south side, the side of the sun. The main question was how could a linear residence deal with that intense light, it seemed that its geometry could not remain rigid, exactly because of it: through a double curvature the building is bent by the power of the sun’s path from east to west.

What makes this space unique?

This is a house that remains vigorously introverted and extroverted at the same time. The elevated volume acts not only as a receptor of the private upper premises, but also as a shelter for the semi-open expansion of the residence and its garden. Its interior ends in a hidden excision of the roof, at the eastern corner. There, a secret small pool serves as an outdoor bath. The handling of curves in this work aims at a tense handling of void and light. Thus, a successive interpenetration of closed, semi-open and open-air spaces is created. The house is curved, twisted, excised, following the field’s forces - natural or urban.

What was your inspiration for this project?

The elevated concrete facade is without openings, except from an excision at the upper corner which reveals an outdoor space open to western views of the city. Behind this emblematic curvilinear cut, the fact of a possibly subconscious loan from the work of Gordon Matta Clark [an New York artist known for carving holes into buildings], could not be negated.

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What was the toughest issue you encountered when this space was being designed and built?

The structural and morphological coordination of all curves and their detailing asked for a constant alert supervision of the project, as well as for demanding special constructions. For example the main excision was realised using a metal mold crafted out of 2cm iron blades. It was a sculpture by itself that no-one wanted to discard after having poured the concrete.

What do you wish you could change in hindsight?

Perhaps I would lower 10 cm the olive-green base that accommodates the bedrooms, which nevertheless will eventually recede behind the climbing plants of the tensed fence.

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What sort of experience do you hope people using this space have?

As the rest of our residential projects, this work essentially remains what the owners dreamed and asked for: a home. Apart form its sculptural or structural qualities a house should remain a space of intimacy, a space that protects, that offers a receptive interior for the growth of human life. At the same time an open shelter, a space where contact with cosmos is preserved: entering through the slim vertical cut the eastern sun falls to the hidden liquid interior and instantly transforms the curvilinear roof by its fugitive reflections.

Please add anything else you feel is important

The meaning of tense architecture network’s abbreviation "tan", root of the Greek verb ‘ΤΑΝ-ΥΩ’ -to stretch, tend, distend - is unconditionally surrendered to writer and philosopher Albert Camus: "…immoderation is a comfort, sometimes a career…Measure on the contrary, is pure tension."