Round Retreat
The project site is located in the rural area of Kurzeme in Western Latvia. The location is known for both its cultural heritage and its natural beauty that is teeming with forests, lakes, and grasslands. The accessibility to the site is limited to an isolated dirt road that passes through natural forests. There are no close neighbors and the site is enclosed by the grassland that transitions into forest.
The spa house takes advantage of this natural resource by providing 600 m² for a single family residence as well as a comfortable therapy area for the spa and sauna.
The building is anchored to the site by its relationship to natural elements. Four trees and a pond present a natural matrix from which our design arises. The formal strategy begins by encircling one existing tree totally and allowing the other trees to erode the perimeter, forming concave spaces in the donut-shaped form. In this way, trees and architecture form a figure-ground relationship. To reinforce the effect of a pure geometry, the “donut” is populated by circular spaces that are excavated from the whole, while creating free-flowing circulation spaces around the programed areas. By liberating the structure of right angles, visitors are allowed to sync with the rhythms and orders of nature as the architecture merges with its surroundings and become a serene backdrop for relaxation and healing. Unexpected glimpses of nature reveal themselves as occupants circumnavigate the building.
Each program element is distributed in cylindrical spaces sized relative to their functions. The relatively
Round Retreat
low occupancy for both the residence and the therapy uses allows for generous circulation spaces throughout the project. The sculptural passages combined with the more intimate programed areas provide a warm atmosphere for groups to gather in but also allows for quiet introspection and solitude. The arrangement of each cylinder is not based on programmatic clusters or adjacencies, rather it is a free-flowing sequence that encourages unexpected interactions. For example, there is a sauna on both north and south sides with bedrooms, spa rooms, and a kitchen interspersed between them. The openness of the floor plan facilitates serendipitous connections and generates new relationships between occupants, architecture, and nature.
The structure and materials of this building are fundamentally considered from an environmentally friendly point of view, in harmony with nature, the experience of residents and its cost-effective strategies. The house is composed primarily of steel, glass, and aluminum. The steel structure first minimizes its physical footprint on the site and then its ecological footprint, when the building is disassembled and subsequently recycled. Also, by elevating the building, and by the lightness which the material provides, the architecture breaks away from the image of a massive development in a pristine landscape, making it light and cheerful and in harmony with nature. In addition, due to the transparency of the building, residents maximize the interaction with nature, experiencing it directly through the generous balconies and openings of the building to the outside.