HOUSE IN ABYDOS

Abydos, Egypt
Concept Design
400 sqm

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In ancient Egypt, a house served the same purpose but with two different timelines, a lifetime and an after lifetime, for the first category Egyptians built palaces with courtyards and colonnades, whether for the second category at the peak of the Old Kingdom civilization they practised pyramid buildings. The project for the House in Abydos proposes to merge the lifetime house with the afterlife house, by settling a new pyramid-shaped concrete home east of Abydos the Architecture is ambitioning to belong to the traditional city of the dead, and having the only window of the house facing west celebrates the end of the day, but the beginning of the soul of the inhabitant following the circle of the sun waiting for the miraculous sunrise of the morning where the beds are located. The window is formed by two fixed 6x3.2m bronze glazing and an integrated sliding 6x3.2m bronze glazed door, facing an external area subtracted from the pyramid shape by a decisive cut that forms both the entrance/veranda of the house, the swimming pool has the same proportion and form as the house itself but inverted, to form a positive/negative dialogue, the volume of water is the same as the volume of the space of the house. A concrete fence of both concrete walls and palm trees encloses the pool area and creates protective shadows according to the orientation, a small gap in the fence is left to celebrate the position of the sunset at the summer solstice (the longest day of the year),

marking the beginning of the journey of the earth away from the sun, a time and space trick that will be observable on our time just one single day, as the next will be in 25.772 years due to the precession of the equinoxes intentionally conceived as a universal message of rebith. An architecture that is meant to be forever, a house that is a mechanism for immortality.