We all get a little carried away sometimes. When it comes to describing houses, this often takes the form of over-enthused brokerbabble, but, occasionally, architects themselves explain their structures in language so loftily-wrought that it transcends mere project description. Take this handsome minimalist compound recently featured on Architizer, a "house of the poet," designed for "dreaming, living and dying." Like Kubla Khan constructing his stately pleasure-dome, Spanish architect Alberto Camp Baeza "raised white walls to create a box open to the sky, like a nude, metaphysical garden." O double-height library, the rapturous intersection of form and function! O open-plan private residence with contemporary fixtures!
The CliffsNotes version of this epic in miniature would have to mention its three-pronged approach. For dreaming, the meat and potatoes of the poetic enterprise, the aforementioned library, a "cloud at the highest point... with northern light for reading and writing, thinking and feeling." For living, which every poet must occasionally take part in, "a space that is all garden, with transparent walls that bring together inside and outside." And for sleeping, "perhaps dying," without which man would have no need for poetic escape, "the deepest level... the bedrooms below, as if in a cave," much like Plato's Cave, which circumscribes us all. Got all that straight? Good.
Really, though, any poet would be lucky to live in such an uncluttered and serene shrine to human achievement, as opposed to some stuffy grad student dormitory. As for Baeza, he also authored this fine concrete-and-glass abode. Compose for it an ode in the comments, why don't you.
· Moliner House [Architizer]
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