A House and studio for the composer Luciano Berio, wheat-field, Tuscany, Italy, summer 1985

Fourth year project, Architectural Association

I still like this project - one of the few projects of which I still have images: I lost my portfolios while moving back to London in 1990 - which at the time felt like a breakthrough.  As a fourth year student, in the summer of 1985, I designed a house and studio for the Italian contemporary composer Luciano Berio.  (It was my choice, brief and location.)  Before the design work started, I was listening to his music in a record shop following an exposure to it by a radio recording from Edinburgh’s summer Festival. The piece I was most inspired by was a song which started with a long period of whispering. Those voices made me think of wheat fields in a light wind.  I imagined the house situated in a middle of a wheat field in the Western part of Tuscany, where the surrounding environment changes with the seasons just as the wheat field changes its appearance: lined brown clods of earth sprout short, green, thin stems which grow into the yellow-gold beautiful wheat, tall in its prime.  Throughout the year the sound of the wind through the wheat changes, the colour changes, and the wheat’s height changes, affecting the house’s relative scale and position.

I started to work on the design, at first through many sketches of silhouettes rising above the open field. I used a thick, black felt-tip pen (I have always had a better line with this than with pencil) and drew many sketches very fast, so as to capture a certain dynamic, while listening to the Berio’s vocal track I liked. As I developed my ideas I added a wooden path to walk on – a wooden path with a slight wobble.  The long, flat wooden beams sat on heavy springs so that you were forced to slow down; the walk became a sensual experience, as if you were swaying with the wheat.  There was also a long triple bench, a fixed, stable one so you could sit on three different levels at three different heights outside the house territory (this is actually still in the field, on the leading path towards the houses); this allowed you to enjoy the smell of the soil, the growing field and change of colour and size throughout the year, while watching the sun’s path in the sky above the open field. The entrance to the courtyard was from its southern side, and was signed with tall thin dark plastic sticks which stood vertically like the wheat stems.  The courtyard was in shadow as its canopy came all the way down to the ground on its eastern side, while the house was situated on its western side and the southern side had the entrance feature while the north was opened. 

For the viewers from long distance the complex of the bench, the courtyard, the house and the very high detached ‘viewing balcony’ (much higher than the roofs of the house and studio), all appeared as one big silhouette hovering below the wide open field of clouds or rising above the wide open field of wheat, full in its growth.

Visualisatios by Yael Reisner.