T/A House

Standing north of Tel Aviv in a landscape brought to life by the piercing Middle-Eastern light, the T/A House mixes the spatial charm of a tradition with no fixed geographical boundaries with a desire for modern design closely linked to the poetic of Paritzki & Liani.

The house is formed of three pure volumes extending along a rectangular plot that have moved to seek a precise relationship between inside layout and outside space. The building’s identity is founded on this interpenetration and can be read in both its layout and section.

Three bays, defined by four parallel load-bearing walls, define the structure and layout, shifting over one another and featuring different heights: the side blocks are lower – the kitchen and dining room ones are 3.40 m and the sleeping quarters are 2.80 m – allowing the central unit to rise to 5 m in height, serving the functions of living room and gallery with more monumental proportions.

This space is reached after passing through a garden accessed from the street front and houses the artworks of the collector owners. It is the public and socialising part of the house, configured almost as a museum space. It leads to the sleeping quarters, filtered by the presence of a semiprivate library, and to the dining room, through a large door that forges a relationship with the sculpture patio which, in turn, terminates the living room space.

The routes filter the passage between private and public spheres but the relationship between the interiors and garden is mediated by the full-height glazing featured at the ends of the three blocks and the different depth of the patio, which extends the expectation of the exterior. At the sides, austere square openings prompt additional dialogues between the house and the outside space that surrounds and protects it.

Paritzki & Liani, T/A House, Tel AvivParitzki&Liani, Casa T/A, Tel Aviv — Paritzki & Liani, T/A House, Tel Aviv

The composition of this house cites, in a cultured tone, architectural types stratified in Mediterranean history, in which the poetic heritage of vernacular architecture is rediscovered in the sign and meaning of the modern language, the deepest thrust of which is “this hunt for images, without beginning or end, goaded by the demon of analogy” [1]. Thanks to this tension, the accord between the parts forming the T/A House conjures up a reference system that embraces within its indefinable radius the Catalan masìa, the southern Italian masseria and the traditional houses of Jaffa – the ancient city beside which Tel Aviv embarked on its race for modernity – the tripartite design of which allows routes to flow and makes the spaces permeable, smoothly linking public functions with the more private domestic ones.

The canon adopted by Paritzki & Liani is strongly rooted in a construction skill that has survived weak and transient tastes but it is also driven by a desire for abstraction that, in their work, never appears as an end in itself but as a means to a purer and more absolute reality. To satisfy the ends of a quest moving in this direction, we see, to paraphrase Mondrian: only what is essential of nature and what is universal of man. There is a desire for stable architecture that is always consistent with the more intimate nature of places but also manages to interpret modern theory and contextualise it in an informed and free code of expression.

[1] R. Calasso, La Folie Baudelaire, Allen Lane, 2012, p. 13

T/A House

Standing north of Tel Aviv in a landscape brought to life by the piercing Middle-Eastern light, the T/A House mixes the spatial charm of a tradition with no fixed geographical boundaries with a desire for modern design closely linked to the poetic of Paritzki & Liani.

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