“Re-imagining the villa is a task for each generation”
Marsh View is a house in Burnham Norton, north Norfolk, designed by Lynch architects and completed in 2003 for a mother and daughter; one a sculptor and the other a textile designer. Due to a change of ownership in 2007 a studio and carport were added. A 1950s bungalow from a developer’s pattern book originally occupied the site. Most of the bungalow was demolished, with its’ plot setting the footprint of the new composition. Two walls were retained with new windows installed. None of this restricts the project. Differences and similarities between old and new are celebrated; the joints between the new structure and the two remaining bungalow walls are expressed. This is a part of a strategy to utilize the tactile and tectonic qualities of the building’s materials and their construction within a coherent spatial whole.
Above: Marsh View from the adjacent fields
The plan is elegantly composed, responsive to the movement of the sun and the nature of human activity. From the garden one enters through the hall, moves into the kitchen, then a breakfast room, before either leaving the interior and escaping the house or turning right and entering a dining room or ascending a set of stairs to a pair of first floor bedrooms. The en-suite master bedroom is discreetly situated in the corner of the dining room. With diagram as it’s generator, the plan is formed in such a way as a network of relationships between people and spaces, exterior and interior. Each room is prepared suitably - in terms of space, composition, and orientation - for activity, mundane or profound. At the end of the house is the main room. This space borders the garden on four sides and has at one end a 7.5m high chimney with an oculus above. This enfilade sequence of rooms within the landscape connects the house to a lineage from Raphael’s Villa Madama to Aalto’s Villa Mairea. We are reminded of the words of Patrick Lynch’s tutor at Cambridge, Dalibor Vesely, that the villa is not just a built form which recurs over time but a key component of the way in which modern society operates.
Above: Plan showing geometric relationship of house to car port and studio
Marsh View is a villa in the most typical sense. It is defined by its social elements; it is at once a studio and a weekend bolthole. The house’s structure is formed of horizontal and vertical plywood elements that allude at once to a canonical past whilst echoing the local architectural vernacular and the earth around and underneath Marsh View. Over time the building will weather, decay and blur even further into the landscape, reuniting the villa’s mythical harmonic position with rural life. This architectural lineage is not a mere quotation or ironic pastiche, and is instead reinterpreted suitably for present day inhabitation. There is a pointed rejection of Andrea Palladio’s position, which merely tacked a facade from antiquity onto a vernacular building in order to legitimize a changing social order. Instead vernacular forms are explored typologically in order to unveil something much deeper and create what the architects have described as “a sense of the past and the present infused within each other”.
Above: Site model
Each room is a fluid composition of rituals that blur distinctions between the exterior and interior worlds. The villa by the very nature of its type seeks to connect itself to the garden and create a sense of continuity between outside and inside. This physical connection ensures that rather than rejecting the seasons and passing of time, Marsh View celebrates human participation with nature, and its potential transformation into theatricality and festival. There is space within this house for a politely restrained dinner party or for a teenage son and friends to blow off some post-exam steam. This is a house that allows one to explore the world, our bodies, and the relationships in between; reminded that the world is something lived through rather than thought about. Large openings and folding doors connect rather than reject the house to the landscape. The house holds dialectic with nature, showing that it is simultaneously of nature and opposed to it. In this regard, perhaps the house holds more of a debt to Aalto’s 1952 Experimental House than the canonical Villa Mairea. Both Marsh View and the Experimental House rise up alone from the landscape, with their imperfect facades and carefully directed views. For both projects, the hearth is a centrepiece. Aalto situates it sunken outside in a courtyard, whereas for Lynch it is set internally on a plinth. For both architects the central gathering point of the house is the hearth’s fire and warmth that it brings.
Above: Photograph showing relationship between the garden and house
There is something surreal about the chimney. Not that it appears out of place. Rather the opposite is true. Instead it plays on the role of buildings and the human figure to act as guides to scale on a rural horizon. This occurs in Lynch architects’ more recent projects and in the work of artists such as Bernd and Hila Becher and Giorgio de Chirico. The dark stained wood exterior and horizontal expression of materials results in an awkward perception of the building’s scale. Yet simultaneously it entwines the house to the landscape. The oculus sets up that most irreproachable human situation of hearth, armchair and view. This is a clear nod to Alvaro Siza and the situated qualities of his private houses. Late afternoon and evening sun fall across this space, allowing for the location of time and place. Beyond the marsh is the horizon and through the oculus is the sky. Mirroring the human condition: the inevitability of death and continuity of life.
Above: Main room with chimney / oculus
Typologically Marsh View exaggerates the formal elements of a house- human scale brick walls, chimney, pitched roof - in order to gain a sense of recollection and grounding from the harshlandscape. These elements form interior spaces that accept and celebrate life. As Aldo Rossi suggested, here architecture is determined by the hour and the event. This is not to be confused with functionalism. There is no reduction of type to image as seen in the worst of Robert Venturi’s work. Instead Lynch architects explore the common emotional resonance of type and the expression of these formal qualities socially in order to make a home.
