BEAUTIFUL FUNCTION
The road from Tinghir to Midelt in Morocco has to be one of the world’s great drives. Take the R703. The mountainous scenery on either side is like no other. There was hardly any traffic. The light is clear and evocative. As usual with a rental car (Peugeot, diesel, 5 speed), we were applying the brakes quite often to take photos of roadside wonderments.
And slam on the brakes we did when this came along. This has to be one of the world’s most perfect buildings. We think it is a barn for animals. Although we are not sure.
It is composed of nothing but planes. Planes for rock walls. Rocks as moveable planes. A roof plane. And then planes that are separate from the structure that stand in front of each opening. And that’s it.
There is a gentle slope to the site. So the wall on the uphill side does not have any openings. Laterally, the site slope has a rise of approximately 24″. The building itself is about 60′ by 20′.
There are no windows or doors. If you want to either increase or decrease the opening, you either remove or add to the stack of rocks in the opening. If you want to make an interior partition, you stack up some rocks in a plane.
The independent planes directly in front of each opening seems to have been constructed so as to buffer the wind thru the building. The walls are made of stacked rocks. The roof plane is made of concrete.
It is pavillion. It is pure rationality. It is problem solved. It is Barcelona. It is 2001. It is perfect.
It fits into the landscape. Note in the one photo how the horizontal roof plane aligns with the horizontal geologic layers of the surrounding hills. It is made of the materials that surround it. If you want to manipulate the structure, you physically move the same elements that the structure is made from.
My drawing employs the Choisey One Point. I tried to capture it all. The structure. The light and shadows. Not that I completely succeeded. This is the type of building that you can draw in many different ways for a long time.
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