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The quest for Rem Koolhaas' "Maison à Bordeaux" |
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LAVA researchers involved in this search: Art' - Rule - Rob It is 8:00am May 4th 1998, we got up to take a peek at the latest villa designed by Rem Koolhaas in Bordeaux. The day before we were inspired by an exhibition at the centre d'architecure, Arc en Rêve'. The exhibition focused on two villa's. Villa Dall'Ava and "Maison à Bordeaux". Here we gathered our basic location information. Like the villa in the Netherlands the address of the villa in Bordeaux is kept hidden as well as possible. The exhibition however reveals the name of the owner of the dutch villa, for obvious reasons we will not break the code and carry this secret with us for as long as we can. Information concerning the location of the "Maison à Bordeaux" was extremely minimum. Let me explain what we had:
Anyway, we took off armed with this information a couple of cameras and a strong urge to get a nice picture or two. Since we didn't even know what the area was called we pin-pointed the location by estimating its place based on the highway and river. Surely this was good enough to get closer and see it from some point in time to make further calculations. The area between the highway and river enclosed about 12km2, and we drove around for at least one hour before we -since we were all men- started asking people in the area. Nobody knew of this exceptional house and therefore were unable to give us any information of its location. Than we spotted a sign for an observatorium. Our hopes reached a peak when we drove up to the highest point of the small mountain, according to our drawings and estimations the observatorium was close to the house. We stopped at the gate leading to the driveway of the observatorium, just behind this gate was a house -which probably belonged to the concierge of the site- with a garden and an old man sprinkling water. I jumped out of the car and approached the fence, dogs were barking on the other side of the street, this must have scared my friends since they followed my tracks shortly after. The man studied the paperwork and started shaking his head.... in the negative direction. His wife came out and my friends nodded a friendly 'bonjour'. Like the other people we approached earlier he asked me if I had the address, this was my cue to turn my head and smile the smile of ignorance. His wife looked at the picture and asked me the name of the people that lived there, again I had to pull the shoulder mussles... She smiled and asked where we came from. Proudly, I answered 'Pays Bas' her eyes reveiled some kind of understanding. We thanked the couple and headed in a new direction. By this time we were on the search for over one hour and a half and the roads started to become familiar...which was not a good sign. We were not ready to give up yet. From the mainroads we started anticipating on taking smaller roads going up the mountain and after a couple of trials we parked the car on a spot were we had some kind of view over the rest of the area. None of the houses looked like the one Koolhaas designed, this was the first time in our attempt to find the house that we started to wonder if we would ever find it. When we walked back to our car, another car aproached the spot were we stood before. It seemed that the couple in the car lived in the house next to the view. I looked at the others, and in a silent agreement we decided we should give it one other chance. The man seemed very interested when we showed the picture and asked for addresses and names, questions we did not have the answer to. He came up with the follwing plan however, why don't you go to the cityhall and show the picture and ask if they know the address! Now this seemed a logical next step to suggest by a person that did not know about the fact that the owner wanted to be left alone. This was going nowhere, we thanked the man and headed back to the car and than we saw another car driving up the street. It was yellow. I ran down the street towards the lady who just stepped out of the car. She was all dressed in blue and I approached her with a smile and a friendly "Bonjour mademoiselle..." She smiled back and looked at me with some kind of supriseness. I told her we were looking for a house and showed her the picture, she nodded... in the right direction, she actually knew where the house was. Relief, this was it, we would be able to go and take some nice pictures to post on LAVA. The next minute however made me very nervous, since she started to give me directions: up the street, when you approach the fork go left, second right, cross the bridge, turn left, continue untill you see a road leading up the other mountain, turn left at fork..... I looked at her and pulled one eyebrow, she smiled again. After a couple of seconds she shook her head at mumbled: "suivez moi". I ran up the road and jumped back in the car with my friends they could tell I was extremely excited. I told them: She knows, she knows and will lead us to the house. Now we all smiled and started chasing the yellow delivery car, postwoman to the rescue. She drove her car like any person in France, extreme. She hardly ever slowed down and we had to pace not to loose her out of our sight. After many turns and some winding roads she stopped at the entrance to a driveway. She stepped out of the car and so did we, we were there. She told us that this was the driveway leading towards the house. She told us to just drive down the driveway to get a closer look at the house. I told her that we did not want to disturb these people and thanked her again for leading us the way. When she drove away we were all by ourselves, it looked like we were in the middle of nowhere. We decided not to go along the path but rather find some spot from the road to get a good angle at the house. We walked along the road and on the left the hill was going up. We started climbing this hill and had to go through the bushes to continue our way, when we reached the first platform it looked like some other people had already done the same. Branches were broken and the high grass and bushes were stepped on. This gave us some kind of hope that others, before us, did the same. It looked like there was one little hill in front of us that we had to conquer in order to get a clear view on the house. By that time I realized that we did not bring any cameras. I phoned Art', who stayed with the car, to tell the news that it looked like we were on the right track. The connection was poor and got cut of the minute he answered the phone. He phoned me right back, anticipating that it was me that called him before. I told him what was going on and informed about forgetting the camera. We decided to first make sure that we would have a view once we were on the top of the mountain. Our paparazzi trip continued and led to... nothing. Even on the top we did not get any other visual than trees and bushes. We walked back down to the road and told the news to Art'. At that time there were people in a van looking at our car. When we approached them they told me that the 'patron' did not allow any visitors. I explained that we just wanted to have 'one' picture of the house since we were architects from the 'Pays Bas'. The woman told me that that was illegal since it was not possible to get a view from the house without proceeding on the premises. I told her that it was not our intention to drive down the driveway and simply wanted to take a picture from the road. Again she told me that was not allowed, I got a little upset and told her that I could not be illegal to take a picture of a house. That surely killed our conversation and the couple drove off. We figured it was the cook and the maid. We decided to take our chances on a view from a different perspective, and took the car and drove down the road. No mather where we went we did not get the slightest view of the house. After two hours and thirty minutes we had one picture. The driveway with a mailbox (surely not designed by Rem Koolhaas!). When we reached the end of the road we looked for a street name. There was none. When we entered the street from the otherside we also missed a sign for a streetname. The mailbox did not reveal any name nor number. Its location was a well kept secret and only with inside information possible to find. We took off to get back to 'Bordeaux centre' and took one more shot from the other side of the river, we used a zoomlens although it does not show. The Koolhaas mystery remains. Our job was done. pictures by: Art', images scaned from the Arc en Rêve pamflet, written by: Rob |