House in Las Rozas is a minimalist house located in Las Rozas, Spain, designed by Fran Silvestre Arquitectos. Five cylinders establish the terms of the project, each holding a discrete piece of the program – the bedrooms, the living area, a volume combining vehicular access with the garage and wellness rooms, another containing the pool and technical plant, and the entrance. Because the curved walls carry the loads, structure and plan resolve in a single move, and each function receives a spatial character determined by the geometry rather than applied to it.
The cylinders are cut obliquely, which does two kinds of work at once. Lower down, the angled section lets each drum meet the slope of the terrain without retaining walls or podiums. At the upper level, the same cut generates the pitched profile traditional to the sierra while opening the interior to light from shifting orientations. Slicing a cylinder at an angle yields an ellipse, so the roofline reads as a taut curve rather than a gable, and a regional building convention becomes a matter of pure descriptive geometry.
Orthogonal volumes arranged at 120-degree angles organize the floor plan and close around a small interior courtyard. That angle is what keeps the composition from feeling either symmetrical or arbitrary, since three directions of rotation produce a pinwheel with no dominant axis. Light entering the courtyard travels across curved and flat surfaces at different rates through the day, continually revising the perception of depth. The arrangement also gives each volume its own exterior ground – two courtyards sheltered from wind and from view, and an open terrace facing the Sierra de Guadarrama.
Fran Silvestre points toward Andreu Alfaro’s Homage to Brancusi as the intuitive origin of the project, and the reference clarifies a great deal. Alfaro’s constructivist bundles of tubular steel, cut on the diagonal and grouped at varying heights, translate Brancusi’s Endless Column from stacked rhythm into clustered mass. The house performs the same translation at inhabitable scale, and it places itself in a specifically Spanish line of thinking about aggregated cylinders that runs through Sáenz de Oíza’s Torres Blancas. For a practice best known for white orthogonal planes folded into cliffsides, the turn toward the drum is a substantial revision of vocabulary.
