The Ring House is located on the southern coast of Crete. The house and its garden are designed to form a temperate microclimate, an oasis within an intensely beautiful but physically demanding environment.
Two concrete beams follow the topography of the hill to define the outline of the house and an interior garden of citrus plants and aromatic shrubs. All the interiors lie between the two beams underneath a flat roof. The roof provides a surface for solar collection panels. On both ends of the ring, the roof is pierced to create well shaded exteriors. The form of the ring allows for views that pan the entire horizon and good natural ventilation for all inhabited spaces.
At a broader scale, the house is a landscape preservation effort. In the past, the land had been severely scarred in an effort to carve roads. We covered the scars and erased the roads with the excavation material extracted during the house’s construction.
Once the earth was restored, the plants needed grow again. During the spring, prior to construction, seeds were collected on site and cultivated in a green house to grow more seeds. These were then sowed over the traces of the old roads and three months later the local plants gradually reappeared, hiding any trace of the old roads.
