Sulicis, Sardinia, is an open countryside dotted with farm fields, green houses and low density development. And it's against the fabric of this earthy background that archictect Fabrizio Leoni painted the casa O, a residential program for a young couple, reduced to its minimum components.

The generative capabilities of the ground and the void among objects; the plasticity of the open space and of the lacking parts of volumes; cavities, enclaves, and precincts--all of these perspectives lead the research that lies behind the visionary design of casa O Leoni ingeniously blended these with the materiality of industrial elements, the mental habit of the dry building process and techniques of assemblage to create an organism, an inhabited macro-cell that embraces a close relationship to the topography and landscape, bending itself among the trees, arching off the ground and unfolding to frame consistent views. On the west side an horizontal cut measures the slope and opens up to the perception of the nearby wood; on east side, a large patio smoothly connects the living domestic internal area with the far coastal landscape.

Observing the relationship between objects and the ground, between the mass and its immediate geographical dominium, the design of casa O moves around and grows on itself, seeking a happy medium between the reduction of earlier rationalism and the formal sensibility of the organic world. The approach and the resulting design are the product of the emotive tension and the allusive confrontation with the tectonic and the sensuality Sardinia, California, Catalonia and Switzerland that has greatly influenced Leoni's work.

Its outer skin is called upon to emphasize the relationship to the surroundings, extending upwards to cover even the roof and suggesting the perception of the house as a massive block wrapped by a film, actually veiling its real tectonic. Indeed, its fluid structure mediates the images of a continuous chassis with its actual nature of an assembled object. Put together as an out-of-scale piece of furniture, the building consists of a steel skeleton fixed on concrete blocks. The skeleton is based on two steel structural cages, one resting on the ground in some spots, while the other is hung from a hollow bigger concrete block linked by a third central part which acts as a bridge.

The floors are made of Prefab Osb wood-and-polyurethane slabs, and 25 cm-thick polystyrene panels constitute the exterior walls. The cladding, a light blue laminated board, creates a ventilated wall and shapes its whole image.

Semi-prefabricated work, demonstrating the strength of methods current in America and northern Europe design, opens the road for an emerging generation of works and procedures, while searching for a sustainable approach that detaches itself from the rhetorical of "local" and "traditional". It demands a new vocabulary and some new compositional registers in the potential of prefabrication.

Lightness in transportation and easy montage are part of that challenge. In the philosophy of casa O, sustainability is not meant to employ traditional or ecological materials to lower cultural impact but is meant to introduce actual control over the amount of energy consumed by the house on the process of building, and over its total life-cycle maintenance. Parameters like passive internal temperature control, natural ventilation on one side and easy-to-assemble materials, handling methods, patterns of montage and safety on the construction site on the other hand, represent some of the "sustainable" requirements that project has tried to fulfill.

Key information

Number of storeys	1 (tri-level)
Living area (m2)	250 m2
New-build home
Surface building	105 m2  + patio 5m2
Volume building	77 m3

Location of steel solutions

Structure
Light Steel Sections