Modern Glass Home Protects Historic Lodge
Need to keep something safe, but want to leave it on display? Just like a museum artifact, but on a much much larger scale, this boxy, two-story, glass-and-metal house contains an aged relic, preserving (while using) uncovered remnants from the elements.
A fitting home for an antique collector of any kind, to be sure, but this new construction by Architectural Bureau G.Natkevicius & Partners is particularly well-suited to the vintage books accumulated by the owner.
The client now has a new archive within the old masonry lodge, which was once part of a medieval cannon foundry that long ago stood on much of the now-flattened the site.
What was originally thought to be a derelict building not worth saving was revealed to have been built of ancient local bricks, of great historic value (not to mention visual interest!).
As such, the new house was wrapped around the old with bedrooms above and below the main level and an open-plan,, glass-encased first floor.
From the architects:
“The customer is a banker and antique book collector. A four member family house. In the Middle Ages the area, where the building is situated, was a cannon foundry. Customers bought a site where stood the old yellow brick lodge with a basement. Cleaning the plaster of a house revealed that the lodge had been built by ancient bricks which were made in a old Vilnius brick factories. Because of a historical and physical value of a house were considered to preserve it by wrapping it with outer glass shape. Historical house structure have been carefully restored.”
“Library of a collection of ancient books equipped in the basement of historical lodge. On the ground floor- children’s bedrooms and in the attic- master bedrooms. At the glass shape zone in the basement we can find the Turkish bath with a rest rooms and a garage for two cars.”
