Olnick Spanu House

Architect: Alberto Campo Baeza
Client: Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu
Location: Garrison, NY
Built area: 10,000 sq.ft.
Completion Date: 2008
Project Manager: Miguel Quismondo
Collaborator: Ignacio Aguirre Lopez, Maria Concepcion Perez Gutierrez
Structural Engineer: Michael P. Carr, P.E.
MEP Engineers: DCE- D’Antonio Consulting Engineers
Lighting Consultant: Gary Gordon LLC
Concrete Consultant: Reginald Hough

Photography: Miguel Quismondo, Javier Callejas

In a place of impressive beauty, Alberto Campo Baeza established a platform that underlines the landscape seeking to enhance it. A large long box is thus built, 122 feet long by 54 feet wide by 12 feet high, with sturdy concrete walls that accentuate its relationship to the land. This ground floor sits on the footprint of an old hunters shed, where the soil is mainly bedrock. Dynamiting and excavation was required to prepare the concrete footings. The ground floor structure is a mixed bearing concrete perimeter wall with interior metal columns; the exterior wall was formed with wood planks and poured in one time, with no construction joints. The roof of this box is flat, paved in stone, travertine, so that we may use it.

The upper floor structure is a 20’ by 20’ metal grid of 8” diameter steel columns and the roof cantilevers 10feet on all four sides. The floor slabs are composite metal decks with lightweight concrete, with a radiant heating system embedded. To make this space habitable, we designed a glass box under the roof, an enclosure measuring 94 feet long by 25 feet wide. The glass wall was designed and fabricated in Houston, while the jumbo size glass panes (thermal double laminated glass with low-e and extra clear glass) were manufactured in Spain.

The glass box is divided by two white boxes that do not reach the ceiling, containing the stairs and service spaces. On one side, closer to the swimming pool, is the kitchen, and on the other side, in the manner of a pensatorio, the area around the hearth; living area and the dining room take place in the central space.