Casa Sudokus

A house in which every room is solved with the same grid, repeated and shifted, until the order is no longer noticeable.

The project kept the original ceiling and added a single wall.

There is a way of working that consists in starting from the end: imagining the house or the shop already lived in, with its things out of place and its lights on at odd hours, and only then asking what it needed. Often the answer is far less than had been planned. The people who live or work there occupy the space all at once and with an energy no plan can anticipate; the best you can do is leave them room, and a certain margin for getting things wrong.

None of these ideas is new, and probably none is exclusive to any one trade. But they are easily lost when there is a hurry, a tight budget or expectations about how things should look. That is why it is worth writing them down from time to time: not as a rule, but as a reminder of what we wanted to do when everything was still possible. The notes that follow are just that, a reminder, and like all reminders they serve mostly the person who writes them.

The pieces from the catalogue come in without imposing themselves.

When you look at a space for long enough, it stops being a set of walls and becomes a succession of hours. The same room is a different room first thing in the morning, when the light comes in sideways and makes the edges visible, than in the afternoon, when everything flattens and the materials seem quieter. To design with this in mind is to accept that no decision is final: an object that works at ten in the morning may disappear at seven in the evening, and the other way round. That is why it pays to work with few things, well chosen, and to let time do the rest of the work.