Glass House - Window Cleaners Dream?

Looking through the pic's - I couldn't find the crapper, so I presume there isn't one or you take a dump outside as nature intended? Because that is the point isn't it? Living with nature & bringing the outside, inside? Or in the first instance - taking it outside, just use some leaves. Either way - at least you'll be able to find the bleach in this house looking from the top floor into the kitchen cabinet next to the tube of Preparation-H.
All very arty & looking like an Ikea magazine, but these designers/architects should try living in there for a while & realise the impracticalities of living in a glass box. Here's just one video for the reasons not to & don't leave a newspaper lying around either! Carlo Santambrogio and Ennio Arosio shouldn't take offense at my comments as "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."
Anyway - good luck living there in the depths of winter & the heat of the summer. I've added a few comments from the website - make of them, what you will. Credit to the architects, for this concept house but unless you have a full time window cleaner, I'd give this one a miss. Featuring a series of iconic furniture pieces, beds, sofas and bookcases, these houses include architectural elements such as staircases and kitchens and even a glass hob! They are all fashioned from ‘extraclear’ glass. As always - click the pictures to enlarge.

"Simplicity is when, in the act of creating the dwelling, matter becomes transparent, a medium for aesthetic values, the stage and theater of representation. Carlo Santambrogio and Ennio Arosio pursue and achieve their design intention in which glass figures as the unquestioned protagonist, excluding the mediation of supports that would challenge its leading role."

"We realize everything is possible in Simplicity, everything can be achieved, provided it embodies a sensitive interpretation of the basic function aimed at satisfying aesthetic needs."

"The Plexiglas joint makes it possible to combine and assemble the sheets of glass, defining architectural works which are one the development of the other and are integrated in and adapted to the most disparate settings.” “The outside world, nature, landscape, penetrate, thanks to glass and its abstractness, into the intimate or private realm inside, and there play, freely as a component of the atmosphere.” Hence the dream, notes Jean Baudrillard, of living “in a garden in close intimacy with nature, experiencing the charm of every season.”

In the words of Gianfranco Maraniello, “contemporary architecture has gone so far as to propose the negation of the ‘wall’ itself, both by creating ‘open’ and sometimes unlivable spaces and by modifying or creating living spaces without circumscribing them as certain defined rooms, or by
making the boundaries of its constructs uncertain.”

Jean Baudrillard: “Glass is the miracle of a fixed fluid, of a content that is also a container, and hence the basis of the transparency between the two: a kind of transcendence which, as we have seen, is the first imperative in the creation of atmosphere… Indestructible, immune to decay, colorless, odorless… glass… is to matter as vacuum is to air… Glass is the basis of a transparency without transition: we see, but cannot touch. (N.B. Please tell that to the window cleaners of the world).

"Glass reflects and integrates the colors of the roses, jasmine and oleanders, of the sky and the clouds chasing each other across the blue; it distinguishes the light of dawn from that of sunset." "Colorless, the supreme material justifies the conception of the whole habitat, of the structure — the container — and of the furnishings — the content. Macro and micro are integrated in harmonious cohesion." "Seemingly immaterial, a landscape within the landscape, it reflects the glow of flame, the green of the vegetable garden, the pink of crustaceans, the red of meat. The interplay of transparencies heightens the senses, revealing food, when there is an occasion for it, a gratifying embodiment of desire, the achievement of the most exclusive life style.”

“No house,” wrote Frank Lloyd Wright, “should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.” It has to belong to the where in everywhere. So, if the house is in the wood, the wood is in the house. This is not playing on words, but a confirmation of the relationship between two representations, one natural the other artificial.

“Remember,” said Ludwig Wittgenstein, “the impression made by good architecture, which is to express a thought. You feel the urge to accompany it with a gesture.” The gesture of building is an extremely musical gesture. Good architecture is good music.



Carlo Santambrogio recounts: “Living in the forest day and night, in sun and rain, in wind, ice and snow, realizing the dream of making the forest the house so as to live in the forest. A house that must never be an object that can just be set down anywhere, but rather a place of enchantment, of wonder, of amazement. Three floors of vertical development, for the sake of all-round vision.