hinge – July 2019

With Silvestre’s rigorous adherence to reduced detailing and smooth,
white surfaces and edges, the villa’s window apertures become another
actor in the drama here, and there aren’t many. But along the sides of
the wings are long, horizontal ribbon windows that enhance the solidity
of the forms. At the ‘elbow’ of the meeting point of the two wings, these
openings come to within kissing distance, one’s sill exactly the height
of the other’s lintel. It is the kind of detail that this office adores, and
does so well; the kind of detail that usually can’t survive past an author’s
conceptual sketches. But Silvestre doesn’t allow conceptual ideas to
be watered down by contingencies of the banal kind. He demands, and
achieves, the sort of ‘purity’ in his finished buildings probably more –
or only – possible in private house architecture. These buildings are
statements as much as abodes, and Coimbra-Steinman is just about as
far as you can push it. Well, at least until the firm’s next one.