CASA CUBO de CORTE (CCdC) / DOMAIN

Casa Cubo de Corte, which will find its home along Lake Tarpon, in Tarpon Springs, Florida and will exist in an environment which has managed to remain intact from the multiple housing booms and bust, which have become as much a part of Florida’s culture, as its beaches, Disney World and High school football. CCdC’s site is one of the few parcels on the Gulf in which one can still experience Florida’s indigenous vegetation, flora and wildlife.

 

In an effort to satisfy conflicting desires: anonymous vs. domestic; engaged vs. foreign; respectful vs. iconic, we have studied countless interpretations of the cube, in effort to achieve the multitude of desires with one shape. The 14m cube has achieved this ambition.

 

The activities of the CCdC, circulation, functions, services, events, and density are hidden within a form that at once appears to be known, but is not. CCdC’s urban strategy consists of a concreted encrusted cube that sits as a foreign yet respectful visitor in an environment, with the sole ambition to simply provide a viewing platform amid the sublime chaos of a raw environment.

 

The entrance into CCdC is uncomfortably torn from the lush tropical plane, to create an intimate threshold between the known and unknown: a gateway into an autonomous architectural heterotopia in constant levitation. We have carefully studied, the existing contorts of the site, so the building can ‘drop’ into a position, which understands the demands of coastal living, like hurricanes and flooding. CCdC will be the ultimate object of man’s desire to control yet preserve. It is perhaps a new

paradigm for our epoch of the anthropocene?

 

At the south edge of the building is the functional core of the building. The core wall has been designed to function both structurally and mechanically as an independent body, thus liberating the domestic space from any technical or structural demands and allowing the interior to be an intense and chaotic demonstration of the domestic.

 

Embracing Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian dialectic, i.e. rational v. chaotic, the stoic and rigid exterior adheres to the Apollonian archetype, rational- as opposed to the interior, which follows the Dionysian Archetype – chaos – with a large open plan that is strategically punctured to provide a cohesive volume, yet at the same time an ability to accommodate series of smaller conditions that allow for individual discovery and focus regardlessly of others.

 

CCdC turns the necessity of a narrative into the choice for one: allowing the family to be productively lost within the cube, we break apart the seemingly coherent dogma of what is a home and how one must live in a home. Rejecting domesticity from a prescribed ideology or value, the volume is composed to allow for a multitude of complexities, desires, interests, and needs.