François Roche. Spidernethewood

No architectural post these last months? Yeah and to be honest, I wasn’t transcended by what I saw until this weekend! I found an interview of FRANCOIS ROCHE, l’enfant terrible of architecture.

FRANCOIS ROCHE
is a French architect graduated from the school of architecture of Versaille in 1987. In 1989 he founded R&Sie(n) -pronounced “heresy”- an architecture studio along with fellow
French architects STÉPHANIE LAVAUX and JEAN NAVARRO.The studio has built a name for themselves with their investigative approach to architecture.

They are currently focusing on developing technological experiments designed as forms of cartographic distortion or territorial mutations, transforming nature into a dynamic element of the design. This organic approach is concerned with linking the context with the building and human relations.

The individual housing Spidernethewood (2007) in Nîmes (France) consists of a 4000 square foot summer house on two floors, with a 20,000 square foot “outdoor labyrinth” of polypropylene mesh wrapped around trees in a plantation and in five years the trees will be at the “left level.

The scenario for this house according to FRANCOIS ROCHE is following:

  1. Over density of existing forest plantation (trees will be at the left level in 5 years)
  2. Netting and Wrapping the trees with a plastic mesh to dig a labyrinth in the branches
  3. Including an Stealth indoor 450 m² building, on two floor, plugged and over connected to this labyrinth by huge sliding glass door (7×3,5 meters)
  4. The boundaries inside/outside became blur for a porosity sensation and windy refreshing
  5. Life behind the indoor extension of the labyrinth, ‘’as you want”, under construction
  6. Lost in the neighbourhood (in five years)


What can be considered important in a project as spidernethewood is that it face the matter of disappearance, of volatility, of lightness.

Spidernethewood is a structure that somehow confuses nature with architecture; nature and structure are made “not differentiable” or “indistinct.”The physicality of an architecture made of immateriality.

It is an architecture shaped by porosity, by empty building structures and no more by the constitution of a density.- by FRANCOIS ROCHE

+ and if you are entirely (or not) seduced by this incredible house, you can read a very good interview of FRANCOIS ROCHE explaining the construction and the concept



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