A weekend getaway, a small house in Poland, on a steep foothill slope with a high risk of landslides. A reinforced concrete core, internal insulation with a cellular foam structure, and basic industrial finishings, all become the tailor-made response to an eternal dilemma: whether to think of construction in tune with nature or in opposition to it.

The Polish architect Robert Konieczny – leader and founder in 1999 of the award-winning architecture studio KWK Promes – has chosen a third path: that of total symbiosis with the forces of nature, achieved thanks to an innovative constructive solution that limits interaction with telluric movements.

He has imagined a residential box developed on a single level with total glazing on the long sides, allowing light and views of the landscape to enter as the protagonists of the spatial composition.

Then, for reasons of security and privacy, he has electrically controlled the closure of the entrance side, inserting a sliding ‘wall’ 10 meters long and a ‘drawbridge’ functioning as a connection and shutter.

Above all, the invention here is the raising of the whole with respect to the sloping terrain, as if the construction were “resting on a framework under which rainwater can freely flow,” he says.

So the volume takes on the form of an archetypal hayloft raised on three slender walls and closed by the traditional cabin roof, which is innovative in the faceted and tapered composition of the surfaces that enclose the lower structure, sloped and overhanging with respect to the ground.

“In the end, it is as if two roofs were coexisting in the overall figure of the house, one facing the sky, the other facing the ground, protecting it from natural phenomena and their consequences,” Konieczny explains. The house has become a suspended ark, floating in the open fields of a ‘non-garden’ design only as a conveyor of magic and enchantment.

Text by Antonella Boisi