House in Morcote
The village of Morcote is situated on the banks of Lake Lugano in Switzerland. This new house is located a short walk west of the village centre, just above the lake shore in an unprepossessing villa district. Through its use of materials and language of forms, the house seeks to reinstate the lost connections with its environment and the old village centre. Fired clay bricks were chosen for the walls, a simple but versatile material also favoured by the Romans when they built Morcote fortress. In form, too, the linear construction even resembles a brick stood on end, rising out of the steep south-facing slope. Slightly angled in relation to the gradient, the house looks out towards Porto Ceresio on the Italian side. The external walls were completed in one single operation. The bricks visible on the inside and outside enclose a core of standard vertically perforated bricks, a combination that provides adequate thermal insulation. Every fourth course of bricks in the outer layer is laid end on. This type of bond enabled the facade to be built without expansion joints, despite using small-format bricks. The outer walls are pierced only by deep-set windows. A wall of pre-oxidised steel sheet marks the way to the front door, behind which is a high, side-lit hallway at the foot of the staircase, the ‘backbone’ of the house. The steps lead up, following the terrain, past a floor with bedrooms and up to the topmost level under the roof. Here, under the exposed beams, the space is flanked by almost unpunctuated walls, thus concentrating attention on the view out of the end walls, open to the courtyard garden and to the lake. Like the walls, other surfaces inside the house – stairs and flooring – are also finished with fair-faced brickwork. The expansion joints on the floors, necessary because of underfloor heating, are filled with quartz sand to maintain visual unity. Clay tiles were even used on the underside of the roof, also as a way of preventing overheating in summer.
