PANE-ORAMIC VIEW
Megan Townsend talks to the team behind The Glass Pavilion – a wall-less house in the Andalusian desert
Looking over the dramatic Tabernas desert, this glass home is designed to give boundless views of the dramatic landscape – by eliminating the need for walls.
The Glass Pavilion designed by Ljubljana-based studio OFIS arhitekti, features a single room surrounding a small perspex-separator encased toilet – working in partnership with Guardian Glass to create glass “walls” that not only provide a window, but are structurally and thermally efficient and can work to separate rooms within the home using shading.
Designing the house to stand in the middle of the desert produced its own issues: to meet fluctuating temperatures within the desert the designers created a external platform to protect guests from both the
The flat roof that reflects the desert floor back into the building – creating an immersive effect – is angularly shaped, pointed in the direction of the mountains to ensure sunlight only reaches the interior of the home when at cooler points of the day.
The pavilion will remain as a holiday home for now, with guests being able to rent it for a week at a time on tourist sharing platforms like Airbnb.
We talked to OFIS arhitekti about the difficulties – and rewards – of creating a project in such a remote location.
Please tell us a little about your practice.
OFIS arhitekti is an architectural practice established in 1996 by Rok Oman and Špela Videčnik, both graduates from the Ljubljana School of Architecture and London’s Architectural Association. Our team is based in Ljubljana, Moscow and Paris. We work on different scales, from large scale sport projects to residential blocks, hotels and small houses. Our academical research involves teaching at Harvard Graduate School of Design and researching habitations in extreme conditions.
What is your practice known for?
We could mention Bate Stadium in Belarus and Basket student housing in Paris as examples of large scale build projects that won some awards and were published widely. In terms of historical intervention, the City Museum in Ljubljana and on a smaller scale we are known for Shelter research – experimenting with local climate challenges and placing small habitable units to trace the response of different spaces, shapes, structures and materials.