A sculptural work housing a family home
A remarkable example of sculptural architecture, this house in the west of Lyon, called “Maison H” and designed by architect and artist Georges Adilon, combines graphic forms, sober decoration and open-plan design.
This house is one of a series of eight built at Brinda, near Lyon, following the favourable response to the architect’s first architectural project and personal home in 1962. Experimenting with “a symbiosis of space, form and light”, he pursued this spatial and visual research by building around thirty houses between 1965 and 1990, characterised by a sculptural, uncluttered approach. The H house bears witness to the themes dear to the artist: an ovoid shape, a dialogue between rounded and straight lines, and the use of an integrated décor.
Its triangular floor plan develops like a fan around the living room, the nerve centre of the space. The kitchen, study, bedrooms and library adjoin the main room, creating a free and joyful assembly with fluid, unrestricted circulation.
The sculptural volumes of the house are expressed through curved walls and numerous nooks and crannies that invite a multiplicity of uses and appropriations. Natural light plays on the orientation, size and shape of the openings – oculi, portholes or loopholes – and animates the singular spatiality of the rooms.
The architect has opted for a palette of raw materials: the structure is concrete, the walls are breeze-block with brick lining, and the floor is made of white cement slabs mixed with pink sand from the Somme.
The refined decor is dominated by the use of white, punctuated by the bright colours of the textiles and objects on the benches, wall shelves and coffee tables, all integrated into the architecture.
Georges Adilon
A French architect, painter and visual artist, Georges Adilon’s prolific, polymorphous body of work is marked by his sculptural practice, which is stripped back and respectful of the environment in which it is set.
In 1964, he met Père Perrot, who commissioned him to design the Sainte-Marie Lyon establishment on Fourvière hill, on the outskirts of old Lyon and in La Verpillière. Each building is seen as a living body, endowed with specific movements and characteristics. The three sites are also characterised by a deep respect for pre-existing buildings.
Between 1965 and 1990, the architect built around thirty detached houses in the Lyon region. Georges Adilon’s architectural principle is to build functional homes where the space responds to the different uses made of it over the course of a day or the seasons. Light and circulation are paramount. The result is openings, slits in the walls, nooks and crannies, different levels for winding paths through the space.
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