Architects: Invisible Studio

Year: 2024

Photographs:Jim Stephenson, Piers Taylor

Design Team: Invisible Studio

Country: Greece

Text description provided by the architects. Invisible Studio creates a ‘rough and ready’ rural retreat to suit the climate of the Greek countryside – The new House in an Olive Grove was designed by Piers Taylor of Invisible Studio for his family, with an appreciation of the local climate and materials. The minimalist, and sometimes rough, aesthetic is a deliberate choice to create an architecture that is flexible for future adaptation while still providing for the basic needs of shelter, shade, sleep, and communal spaces.

Taylor has been visiting this area in Greece since the early 1970s and it was important that the new building should draw upon the rich local history of making rudimentary structures out of the materials that people had to hand. The island is still dominated by small-scale agriculture and there is a lack of preciousness that is a welcome antidote to the usual experience of architects trying to control the design and construction process. Inspiration was also taken from architects such as Glenn Murcutt, who pioneered a type of climate-responsive design that is heavily influenced by the landscape that surrounds it.

The house is located in an earthquake zone and fire danger zone, and there are limited materials to build with other than reinforced concrete using local limestone aggregate (making formwork is a key local skill). There are simple rooms contained within the main volume, made entirely from concrete (walls, floors, ceilings, kitchen, some furniture), and on top, a large shaded living space under a corrugated roof supported on red oxide reinforcement bar trusses, again, drawing on the skills and materials available locally. There is no glass involved in the creation of the house, only galvanized weldmesh sliding screens, separate sliding insect screens, and plastic curtains. Materials were often selected by what was available from the hardware store in the village. There are no designer inflections that suggest this is (capital A) architecture. There is no gate, no fence, and no taming of the landscape around it.

Piers Taylor, director of Invisible Studio said: “I wanted to create a building whereby all of the ‘mistakes’ are made evident, meaning the processes and decisions made by the locals who built the house. The organization of the formwork is eccentric but has a logic and a language based on the materials they had to hand, in and the sequence in which they worked. “There has been a conscious attempt to make a house that is rooted in the materials, techniques, and resources that exist in a small Greek island, existentially concerned with the loss of identity that comes from a multitude of ubiquitous and generic buildings that have been built here over the last 50 years. With House an Olive Grove, I had an increasing sense that there was an opportunity to develop architecture from the ordinary, the everyday, and the local which was overlooked in the pursuit of the generic Mediterranean tiled roof, cream rendered, marble-floored villa, in a context where the local has an extraordinary specificity and richness.”