Future House(s):Genealogy: Villa Nurbs

Uses ceramic plates against solar radiation. Wavy Corian ceramic plates made from digitally-cut molds cover the roof’s north side, further deflecting solar gain.

The plastic “bug eyes” is made with energy saving materials. These are ETFE plastic bubbles. They help to deflect sunlight, thereby reducing the Villa Nurbs' energy consumption.

Fluid continuous surface?

Two cylindrical concrete legs support an oval concrete platform. The main entry and a guest apartment are housed within these legs; the rest of the house is located above, where a series of rooms encircle a courtyard pool.

Completely visually and physically cut off from the outside other than the connection to the clouds.

The main living areas wrap around the pool, with the living room, kitchen office and spa on one side and the bedrooms on the other. The bedrooms overlook the pool area through a glass-enclosed corridor. The rest of the house is conceived as a series of interlocking zones. There are no doors. Instead, each zone is conceived as its own microenvironment, like the passenger seats of a luxury car. Lighting, temperature, sound and windows can be adjusted with hand-held remote controls.

The entire space is enclosed under a taut translucent skin made of ethylene-tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) — a matrix of inflatable plastic roof panels. The oblong panels are imprinted with negative and positive grids on each side. When they are injected with air, they expand to let in daylight; when the air is let out, they contract again, blocking out the light and views up to the sky. The effect looks almost like a living organism — an enormous grid of robotic eyes.

It is attuned to its context in subtle ways. A wide asphalt drive connects it to the street; there are no exterior windows. The north facade is clad in white Corian, a hard translucent plastic that will glow inside during the day and outside at night.

Its other end is clad in inky ceramic tiles that protect the interiors from the harsh southern sunlight. The tiles were hand-painted by the Spanish artist Frederic Amat to give the house “an element of random chaos,” Ruiz-Geli says.

house as a laboratory. The original idea was for a series of separate pavilions, but as the design evolved these were all amalgamated into one structure organized around a central swimming pool. The result is a blob on legs. It has a heavy concrete base but it gets lighter as it rises towards a roof of ETFE pillows. These employ a system of opening and closing layers that insulate the interior – just one of the six Cloud 9 patents embedded in the house, along with a translucent concrete that allows you to text message your guests on the front door. There are no standard parts, everything in this house is bespoke: the cable system holding together the concrete structure, the car body-like steel frame, each Corian facade panel, every single ceramic tile, every window, the pool and soon the furniture.

NURBS (or non-uniform rational Bezier spline) is the most complex kind of smooth surface you can create in computer modeling. The form is almost prosaic by  the standard of today’s digiterati.

Speculated scale less as there is no outward connection the human body.

The interior is more or less a continuous space, except for a separate spa area. Like the works of Antoni Gaudi, there are no corners, but rather the seamless flow of surfaces.

The only walls are the curvaceous glass ones around the central pool. Etched with a blue dye by artist Vicky Colombet, they will presumably radiate a blue light.

The space withing the legs, dramatic 26m cantilever intended as the roof of an outdoor room.

with its hearth-like pool, this is an extremely introverted house, perhaps the perfect interpretation of the future suburban life. More than anything it reminds me of Frederick Kiesler’s Endless House of the 1950s, a fluid space encased in a Surrealist egg.

Both Kiesler and Ruiz-Geli treat the house like a theatre, a protective womb in which a family can play out life’s daily dramas and rituals.

“hardware” removed to this centralised engine room, the house is left to be pure interface. There won’t even be any light switches, just sensors. Ruiz-Geli likens the shed to the astronaut’s backpack, a life-support system removing the whir of technology to preserve the silence of space.As in the theatre, gadgetry clears the stage for the smooth performance of everyday life.

The ceramics for the north wall of this building were produced using digitally-cut molds under the direction of Cumella. These pieces form the building's ceramic ‘skin' and are shaped in a manner inspired by the scales of a reptile, and were painted by Amat. Ruíz-Geli has brought industry and art closer together by integrating traditional materials such as ceramics and latest-generation materials such as Corian panels by DuPont and ETFE segments by Covertex.

The mixture of ceramics and plastics try to optimize the surface and structure, which is important for the temperature regulation inside the house.

harmonize nature with technology. The energy-saving roof consists of inflatable plastic bubbles.