Tag Archives: sardinia

This cliffside villa built in harmony with nature brings out the coastal mountain’s environmental beauty!

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Villa La Grintosa is an elemental residence located in the coastal city of Porto Servo, Sardinia atop a rocky massif that helped to define the home’s floor plan and harmonious layout.

Homes built in harmony with their surrounding landscapes tend to produce havens of elemental architecture. Whether the home’s layout weaves through clusters of pine trees or the rocky edge of a coastal mountainside, the challenge of letting nature decide a home’s structure is always worthwhile.

In Sardinia’s Porto Cervo, Stera Architectures, an architecture agency based in Paris, designed Villa La Grintosa, an all-season residence built to harmonize with the rocky massif it stands on.

The seaside community of Porto Cervo is no stranger to cliffside homes. With dozens of homes puncturing both sides of the mountains that give rise to the port city, Stera Architectures was in the right place when planning Villa La Grintosa.

The team of designers behind La Grintosa went into the project knowing that altering the preexisting landscape wasn’t an option. Taking it one step further, in building La Grintosa, Stera Architectures hopes to enliven the rocky massif where the home is situated.

Noting the harmony of the planning and design process, the team at Stera Architectures describes La Grintosa as an “architectural walk in harmony and continuity with nature where different universes meet and intersect.” Arranged around a central courtyard, La Grintosa’s orientation splits into two different axes–one that faces the sea and one that faces the mountain’s massif.

Arranged on two platforms, the points where these two axes meet become intersections of the home’s main living spaces. Paying credence to the home’s “architectural walk,” Stera Architectures incorporated exterior walking ramps that form a true endless loop through the home, connecting the living room on the eastern facade with the home’s lowest point.

Open-air rooms, Azulejo ceramic work, as well as the home’s uniform exterior cladding made from granite and crushed lava stone paste all work together to send home the infinite loop that Stera Architectures set out to etch into La Grintosa’s elemental layout.

Designer: Stera Architectures

The Azulejo tilework accents bring out the blue hues of the sky and coastal views. 

Open-air rooms flow between outside and interior spaces throughout the home’s floor plan. 

Curved archways meet straight-edge functional elements for a dynamic and harmonious touch. 

Outside, the taupe and gray color schemes merge with the natural rocks that surround the home.

The home’s ever-changing facade mimics the unpredictable terrain of rocky massifs. 

Outside, gray elements drape the home in an elusive guise, while the home’s white stone walls brighten the interior. 

These modular prefab homes could be the world’s first to use a steel 3D-printed “exoskeleton” construction system!

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Located in Orani, Sardinia, Exosteel comprises the world’s first housing development to use a steel 3D-printed “exoskeleton” construction system that supports and distributes all the functional elements of the building, inspired by the sculpture work of Costantino Nivola.

Museums are social hubs for travelers. They’re cultural and artistic landmarks first, yes. But they’re also guaranteed spots where tourists can take some respite from long hours spent wandering the city. Near the Nivola Museum in Sardinia, Italy, international design studio Mask Architects visualized a cluster of homes to function as a housing development for the surrounding community. Conceptualized as a small village of modular prefabricated steel houses, Mask Architects is the world’s first architecture and design firm to use a steel 3D-printed “exoskeleton” construction system to build the small village, calling it Exosteel.

Exosteel comprises a group of modular steel homes that would be constructed using ​​a 3D-printed construction system that supports and distributes all the functional elements of the building. Mask Architects co-founders Danilo Petta and Öznur Pınar Çer felt inspired by Costantino Nivola’s sculpture work, in particular a travertine sculpture called ‘La Madre.’ Punctuating the terrain of a sloping mountainside in Sardinia, Exosteel is comprised of heart-shaped, white homes with center ‘energy towers,’ oriented in the same way as the head on Nivola’s ‘La Madre.’

Mask Architects plan on building Exosteel by first inserting a hollow central column ⅓ of the building’s height into the ground, reinforced by wooden beams to support each home’s three floors. Then, on each floor, a perimeter frame “divides and supports the [home’s] facades made up of panels modeled to follow the organic shape of the house,” as described by Mask Architects. Following Nivola’s pursuit of binding communities together through art, Mask Architects chose Exosteel’s location due to its proximity to Orani, Sardinia’s national museum, where Nicola’s ‘La Madre’ is on permanent display.

Striving to ensure each building is entirely “self-sustainable,” Mask Architects designed each module that comprises Exosteel to be expandable and flexible to meet the conditions of Sardinia’s natural climate and weather conditions. Considering Orani’s propensity for wind, the homes of Exosteel are completed with built-in voids that guide wind through each building to the development’s communal wind turbine. As described by Mask Architects, Exosteel garners energy from individual energy conduits placed at the top of each home.

Describing the energy conduits, Mask Architects note, “Each building is centered with an ‘Energy Tower’…covered with solar panels that will harvest solar energy while the top of the central energy tower itself will rotate 360 degrees at the same time with the wind that will also generate wind turbine energy…​​The main centered energy tower that houses all the systems is constructed out of a steel skeleton. By connecting our bearing steel beams to this skeleton column, we actually created a completely self-supporting steel carcass metal structure.”

Designer: Mask Architects