The design that first brought Emilio Ambasz to international attention as an architect is one of the most compelling architectural images of our time. Unforgettably, two tall white walls rise like sails from a green sea of grass. A steep cantilevered staircase climbs each of the walls to meet at the right-angled juncture of the two white sheets. This dual mirror like image soars mysteriously above a square sunken courtyard, or patio, bounded on the two opposite sides by an arcade. Beyond this colonnade lies the house itself, waiting to be discovered, its alcove-like-rooms spread out amid serpentine skylights and openings. In stark contrast to the conspicuous upward-reaching walls, the dwelling is concealed by means of earth berms, yet both features boast relationships to the primal elements of sun, sky, stars, and wind above, as well as those of the enveloping earth and the water that is channelled within its walls. Utilizing elements of extreme contrast to achieve a profoundly contemplative mood of unity, Ambasz’s startlingly original Casa de Retiro Espiritual may be elucidated by means of two contrasting yet complementary modes of engagement.
Of the many ways of engaging with an architectural work, there are two especially pertinent to this spiritual retreat; a house devised both as a receptacle for the changing play of light and mood as well as a carefully choreographed sequence of experiences. To move physically through the house exploring and experiencing its spaces in sequence is the more active mode; the other is observing patiently how slowly subtle changes – light, color, temperature, movement, sound – register and rotate through the days and seasons. By means of these devices, the viewer is gradually induced to open up to a contemplative mood and awareness of cyclical time in which even the simplest of daily rituals is invested with semi sacred intensity.
First seen as a Progressive Architecture Project First Prize Award winner in 1975, and widely published since, this house was clearly like no other. Not everybody understood it, and many still remain dazzled by pondering its imagery rather than imagining its promised experience: the protracted ritual of approach and entry, the shifting light and mood within the court’s partial enclosure, and the profound poetry of opening up to the multisensorial magic of the whole.
Ambasz has realized the promise of his design by constructing the house in an idyllic arcadia – as a kind of Andalusian dream – within which it is precisely and poetically placed in relation to the surrounding landscape views as well as the solar and celestial constants, drawing both landscape and ambient elements into a relationship with itself, and it with them.
The house crowns a headland projecting toward a manmade lake near Seville in the Sierra Morena, a range of low and verdant mountains dotted with evergreen oaks. It is situated within a 600-hectare estate that comprises fighting bulls and beef cattle, an ancient and rare breed of Spanish horses, dark grey pigs fed on acorns for wine-dark ham, as well as wild boar and deer. Especially in spring, with wild flowers in riotous profusion, it epitomizes an aspect of Andalusia that fed the dreams of paradise of the Moorish kings at their lavish Islamic palace at Granada – the Alhambra.
As the approach road from Seville turns and dips into a valley, the house suddenly appears atop the headland on the opposite side, then disappears from view along the drive that snakes across the valley toward the higher ground, only to reappear suddenly right before you as an interior dirt road crests the ridge. Ahead, the two tall white walls rising from the grass amid a grove of ancient olive trees meet at a right angle pointing exactly toward those arriving. Set into the base of the corner, angled across it, is an ornately carved dark wood entryway with matching doors. Above this, toward the top of the corner where the stark walls meet, and folded around both planes, is an elaborate, similarly carved wood balcony enclosure, with intricate latticework derived from the Hispano-Islamic tradition. Not yet seen are the crisp steel cantilevered stairs that provide access to this delicate aerie from the inner side of the walls.
Passing through the doors, you find yourself standing above the corner of a sunken, diagonally oriented square patio from which the two walls, now seen to be extending upward from the patio’s two closest sides, form the gigantic gesture of an open book or simply of an open-handed offering. They not only welcome you to the house but also gesticulate to the panoramic view, across the sunken house and its grassy roof, toward the lake in the near distance and the mountains beyond. Below, a shady arcade of cylindrical columns spanned by carved dark wood beams borders the two far sides of the patio, and fanning downward and toward it are broad deep steps, made negotiable by an intermediate path of shorter slabs that curves lightly to the left as it descends, gently subverting the strict symmetry of the rectilinear space. This flight downward ends exactly at a point that diagonally bisects the patio and where the last step meets a semicircular pool that marks the patio center.
The heavy wood beams spanning the columns, like the doors and balcony already encountered, are traditional in form, with carved corbelled brackets and wrought-iron straps. In contrast to the ornate surfaces of the delicately worked wood elements, almost everything else – the plastered walls and cylindrical columns – is smooth and white, and gives a Mediterranean sharp-edged contrast between blinding light and deep shade. The patio floor – like that of the further sunken ambulatory behind the arcade as well as that of the interior visible through the glazing beyond – is of smooth white marble lightly streaked with grey. So, too, are the slabs that edge the broad steps of white marble chippings, and the shorter blocks of intermediate steps. Crisply minimal steel, painted grey, delineates the other principal elements visible from the exterior: the frames of the glazing and sliding doors, some tubular columns just visible inside, and, most conspicuously, the cantilevered treads of steep stairs that climb each of the tall walls to the entrance of the balcony projecting outward over the entrance doors. In this deft mix of soft and hard, curved and orthogonal, pervading the space and contributing considerably to its cool and contemplative atmosphere is the soft murmur of moving water that you later discover rushing down runnels in the recessed handrails of the stairs to the balcony.
Even as the mind takes in the narrow soaring stairs and sun-drenched white walls, the descent into the ground continues on the broadening stairs below. The curving downward route slows the pace, as a delta calms the flow of a river into the sea, so that you are apt to reach the patio floor in a rapt silence, as time, too, seems to slow down, to be greeted by the pool, perhaps inviting a cool splashing of hands and face. This patio is the serene heart of the house, its all-season outdoor living room, where sunny spots can be found on chilly mornings and, in the heat of the day, cool shade is created by the tall walls that, at night, reach up to embrace the stars and make them an intrinsic part of the open room.
Inside the glazed walls and doors a single large L-shaped living and dining room folds around the patio ambulatory, a few steps below the arcade, and opens into it through sliding glass doors. Across the room, as another source of light and outlook, additional glass doors edge a small secondary patio whose sinuous curves contrast with the orthogonal arrangement of the main one. It will contain a potted orange tree and has a small stone stair up leading informally to the grounds outside. Elsewhere, along the back wall of the main room, doors open into several small top-lit bedrooms, bathrooms, and a kitchen, all set as individual cell-like alcoves. Electrically operated perforated aluminium shutters protect the glazing, but remain hidden when not in use; they serve mainly for security but also to temper the bright glare from the patios. Those along the main patio roll down out of the ceiling; those along the secondary patio slide horizontally from a slot on one side.
Ambasz’s name for this house, Casa de Retiro Espiritual, makes explicit that the entire complex is conceived as a spiritual retreat. Isolated on its estate, it withdraws below the ground. At a simple remove are the bedrooms (for deep dreams) and the bathrooms (oozing oriental sensuality); and still further removed, is the remote elevated balcony. Like those found throughout the Islamic world, and following a traditional Andalusian pattern, this balcony is enclosed in a lattice of turned wooden spindles, giving privacy and shade while admitting the breeze. Though offering magnificent views of the lake and estate, it is essentially introverted in character, a place to lounge or meditate or read and only occasionally get up to enjoy the view, perhaps of a sunset, reflected in the lake and touching the tall walls with a rosy tint.
This is a house that is unique in every way, yet it is full of familiar, particularly local, resonances. Some may see Andalusian precedent in the whitewashed mountain dwellings of gypsy troglodytes. But even more relevant are earlier Arabic and Moorish precursors, from which derive the patio form and carved wood vocabulary. The house’s languid, dreamy, and contemplative atmosphere, even as it juts out mysteriously from the earth, recalls stories of the Alhambra (in whose gardens there are also stairs with water channels in the balustrades, although Ambasz only discovered these long after the house was originally conceived).
The house remains unfurnished, but it is easy to imagine it done up Arab-style with only carpets and cushions for lounging, especially around the kidney-shaped conversation pit in one section of the main room. Indeed, patterned ceramic tiles, cool in color and to the touch (or the softly gold colored glass tiles originally envisaged), would be splendid in the interior. And the elevated balcony recalls both the harem musharabiye and the Indian chattri of Islamic tradition, a place you expect to find a pasha smoking his hookah and listening to poetry or music from a favourite concubine. But, too intoxicating an experience, however administered, would be ill advised: the long steep flights of steps are precarious to descend for first-time visitors, even those clinging to the handrail hidden in the water-runnel recess.
Designed in the heyday of eclectic-historicist postmodernism, the house evidences some of its referential concerns by means of historical motifs. But, formally, it is abstractly modern; the traditional crafted elements are used unmodified and with unabashed directness rather than, as in postmodernism, with sniggering cartoon like irony. Also, strictly postmodernist buildings were designed to be deciphered through their recognizable motifs or “quotes,” whereas the meanings of this house, which are allusive yet potent, are largely in the experiences it offers. The visual chatter of most post-modern buildings is the antithesis of the silence induced here.
To clarify in what ways the house is and is not modern, a fruitful, if surprising, comparison can be made with Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, where allusions to classical precedent (e.g., Palladio’s Villa Rotunda) are so oblique they only become obvious after the fact. Both houses are organized around a processional route through a courtyard that then terminates in an elevated, framed view of the landscape. But while Savoye’s route is devised to show off its architecture, Casa de Retiro’s route is more ritualistic in intent, delicately provoking different psychological moods and eliciting awareness of the self as well as the architecture. Also, Savoye’s ramp climbs through its center to reach a taut, thin-skinned modernist composition hovering lightly above the landscape; here, the route skirts the center as it descends into a heavily earthbound dwelling that is archaic as much as it is contemporary. Savoye’s spatial emphasis is centrifugal and horizontal, as attention is swept outward to a continuous eye-level slice of landscape; in Casa de Retiro, the interior spatial emphasis is centripetally inward to the patio where the vertical dominates as it links the enveloping earth and overarching sky, with the pool marking an axis mundi. (Villa Savoye also greets those arriving with a basin, a ceramic sink, to wash off the dirt of the outdoors, a symbolic rinsing away and disconnecting with the earth before rising to elevated airy realms. In contrast, in Ambasz’s chthonic realm, the pool is a vestigial impluvium, which in Roman and Arabic prototypes collected rain from the heavens above and served almost as a mysterious eye to the earth below. In Ambasz’s house, a hand is dipped into the water not to dissociate from the earth’s dirt, but, rather, as a reverential genuflection to the earth.)
Villa Savoye was commissioned for entertaining, as a chic contemporary setting for country weekends for a smart Parisian set. Ambasz’s house also lends itself for entertaining, but its concern is more with the timeless quality of a place of contemplative and intimate reclusion. Since this temporal dimension is as crucial to architecture as the spatial, processional routes simultaneously connect and separate elements and activities, not only spatially but also in time, as do the elongated ramp at Savoye and the widening steps into the patio and steep stairs to the balcony at the Casa de Retiro. As in other rituals, these space-time transitions are prolonged to intensify awareness of them and of the place and the psychic state to which they convey you. This is particularly so at the Casa de Retiro.
The two houses also share another concern with time, both having been shaped as receptacles for the play of light and to heighten awareness of the passing diurnal and seasonal cycles. But Savoye, when built, seemed to look forward yet defy the passage of time to which it proved very vulnerable; it looked best and made most sense when pristine, but it quickly deteriorated into a ruin which needed extensive restoration. Ambasz’s house, however, although startlingly fresh and novel when pristine, is easily imagined as being enhanced by the patination of time and use. If the plaster on the walls were to become a bit wobbly with age, and if moss were to appear here and there, the house should seem even more timeless, as its roots in tradition and even in the very wellsprings of architecture (which, as anthropologists remind us, lie in the retreat into caves and the choreography of ritual, acts more concerned with the sacred than with mere shelter) become more evocatively evident.
This, then, is a house not only for retreat and reverie, but one that provokes daydreaming, even when contemplated from so far away that the imagination is free to slide backward in time, morphing somewhat in dimensions, materials, and use. For instance, striking as the patio is at night when lit electrically, in the mind’s eye it might be even more poetically magical if the warm soft light of candles or lamp flames danced on the bottoms of the tall walls above which the stars shone bright. Appropriating the house in one’s imagination, playing with it and modifying it in this manner, it becomes yet more ageless as it becomes more rooted in daily use and routine, potted plants invading and softening the patio, the ambulatory accommodating cast-off furniture, the pool deepening to make more explicit the connection with the earth below, the marble worn and stained with use, or perhaps the slabs replaced with cobbles (as found here and there in Seville) to soften glare and give the floor a more physically tactile presence.
Although my own reverie distorts the house of Ambasz’s dreams and contaminates the purity that is also a major part of its appeal, it also draws attention to a final crucial distinction between it and Savoye. Le Corbusier’s house might be seen as the airy realm of a superior intellect, concerned with ascension and dissociation from the earth. By contrast, Casa de Retiro, although it includes both sacred archetypes of retreat, the cave and the tower – earth, water, and air – speaks more to the immaterial essence of spiritual power: to the soul.
Ambasz and some American critics have characterized his architectural approach as “green”, or ecological, because it seeks harmony with nature, even by disappearing into it or forming an extension of it, returning a site area as much as possible to nature by banking earth and plants against walls and over roofs. This leads, in turn, to increased comfort and savings of energy and carbon dioxide emissions because of the resulting high levels of insulation and thermal inertia (whereby the mass of the surrounding earth absorbs heat during summer days and radiates it back during cool nights and winters). Even in the exceptional heat of summer 2003, when Seville reached the upper forty degrees centigrade, the house remained an equable twenty-three degrees; and when winter temperatures fell to six degrees, the house remained at eighteen degrees, even if unenclosed by glazing. Yet, there is more to green design than energy savings and verdant roofs.
When this house was first projected in the mid-1970s, the autonomous house, isolated and self-sufficient in its own productive garden or estate, epitomized the green ideal. But, today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the autonomous house is now perceived as socially problematic owing partly to the time and energy expended in commuting, and as reinforcing social isolation. Today, the green ideal is epitomized by connection, not isolation: living in compact cities of mixed, multiuse neighborhoods, with all facilities nearby and strong community ties.
Thus, the new green agenda seeks communion with nature and community to provide the joy, succor, and meaning that will help to wean us from the desperate consumption with which we distract ourselves and defend against modernity’s lingering legacy of alienation and meaninglessness. This is an urban ideal to which Ambasz’s 1990 Prefectural International Hall for city government offices in Fukuoka, Japan, has made a most important contribution, with its planted roof terraces forming a verdantly stepped extension to a city park.
Yet, achieving sustainability requires more than ecological and technical measures; it also requires changes to our cultural representation of the world and our psychological responses to it as well. And, it is in this regard that Ambasz’s house has its greatest significance for our time, even as a house set apart from the urban condition. For the Casa de Retiro Espiritual reminds us of the deep psychic impulses from which architecture originated and provokes us to question what architecture is and could be. Therefore, it points forward as well as backward, and vividly evokes a crucial dimension of a more complete green architecture for the future. It may not offer a connection with community, yet it is an enchanted setting for intimate communion, most especially with an intensified sense both of the inner self that it draws outward and the distant cosmos that it draws down into its center.