La Cretâ Farmhouse
La Cretâ Farmhouse is a minimalist apartment located in Mézières, Switzerland, designed by Bard Yersin Architectes. Restoration in architecture often means accumulation – adding layers of historical detail to approximate an imagined past. This project inverts that impulse, treating restoration as an act of subtraction that recovers spatial character rather than surface appearance. The 18th-century Fribourg farmhouse had already undergone one transformation in 2011, when its rural volume was domesticated through conventional renovation tactics: concrete replaced timber joists, masonry supplanted wooden structure, and glulam beams substituted the original roof framework. What remained was functionally habitable but spatially diminished, its agrarian logic obscured beneath residential norms.
The re-transformation strategy centers on recovering the fourragère – the central passageway that once served as a feeding corridor for livestock housed in flanking stables. This through-space possessed qualities essential to the building’s original typology: horizontal continuity connecting opposite facades and vertical expansion accommodating hay storage above. The 2011 intervention had partitioned this void into discrete rooms and capped its height with a concrete slab, erasing both its connective and vertical dimensions. Bunq Architectes removed these partitions entirely and cut through the full depth of the slab, restoring the fourragère as the spatial organizing principle.
The resulting tripartite layout honors the building’s structural logic without mimicking its former agricultural program. The reclaimed central space functions as the primary living area, while service rooms and bedrooms occupy the structural bays that once contained stables. This arrangement preserves the essential spatial diagram – a dominant central void flanked by cellular spaces – while adapting it to contemporary domestic life. The approach demonstrates how typological intelligence can bridge historical structure and present-day habitation without forcing either into uncomfortable compromise.
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