Davide Macullo’s artistic timber house in the Swiss Alps

In a small village in Switzerland architect Davide Macullo has created an artistic response to the landscape through architecture with a timber house, a new addition to his Swisshouse series of houses in the Calanca Valley

Davide Macullo’s artistic timber house in the Swiss Alps
(Image credit: macullo.com)
By Harriet Thorpe
last updated

In the Swiss Alps, Davide Macullo Architects has built a new house in the heart of the small village of Augio. The dynamic creation, carved out of a cube, is part of Macullo’s ‘Swisshouse’ series of houses that form a collection of artistic responses to the enchanting Alpine landscape.

This small timber house features an abstractly sloping roof and an interior space full of daylight. The roof was inspired by the surrounding architectural vernacular of pitched roofs and the mountains. The windows have been positioned to bring the landscape into the house, as well as plenty of light.

The form of the house is a meditation on bridging architecture, place and art together – where the design is the bridge between them. While reflecting the existing built environment, its exaggeration explores how architecture is an instinctive cultural expression of living within a specific geographic context.

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Lugano-based Macullo, who worked for Mario Botta for 10 years, has been long enamoured by the history of the Alpine villages of the Calanca Valley, how people inhabited the rocky landscape, near the powerful Calancasca river, finding beauty and a home within these extreme conditions.

Windows in the timber house

(Image credit: macullo.com)

Inside the house

(Image credit: macullo.com)

INFORMATION
macullo.com

Topics
Switzerland Houses Wood Architecture
Harriet Thorpe

Harriet Thorpe is a writer, journalist and editor covering architecture, design and culture, with particular interest in sustainability, 20th-century architecture and community. After studying History of Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and Journalism at City University in London, she developed her interest in architecture working at Wallpaper* magazine and today contributes to Wallpaper*, The World of Interiors and Icon magazine, amongst other titles. She is author of The Sustainable City (2022, Hoxton Mini Press), a book about sustainable architecture in London, and the Modern Cambridge Map (2023, Blue Crow Media), a map of 20th-century architecture in Cambridge, the city where she grew up.

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