Mono-crystalline type of house

The implosion of the landscape continues inside the house. There are neither service hallways nor a truly habitable center. The rooms adjoin each other and create a structure as though four houses had been compressed into a conglomerate from the outside and the concrete supports were left behind as joints whose fusion process can still be seen. Later on, Herzog & de Meuron gave a detailed description of this mono-crystalline type of house in their design for a development in Sils/ Engadine."

MACK, G. (Ed.), Herzog & de Meuron 1978-1988, Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel, 1997

078
Sils-Cuncas Settlement Design
Sils, Engadin, Switzerland
Competition 1991

What is the relationship of the houses to the landscape?
Sils-Cuncas is a group of houses. As in a village-Isola, for example, or, at a higher altitude, Grevasalvas the houses seem to be placed coincidentally in the landscape. In spite of their comparatively high and heavy cubes, they form a nearly romantic, somehow familiar building composition.
Perhaps this first glance, this first impression formed by a person traveling by in a bus or car or on cross-country skis is not so wrong and, especially from an urban architectural and landscape design point of view, not so uninteresting: houses grouped together to form a settlement that under closer observation, upon second, more critical inspection reveals itself as an independent reflexive settlement structure.
[...]
Simplified, Engadine architectural typology can be understood as a combination of single, finished monocrystalline cells into more or less homogeneous classical architecture in which the single cell relinquishes its outwardly visible independence or as a combination tending toward a more or less heterogeneous architecture in which, as in a stone conglomerate, the single component, the single space or the single architectural element remains visible.
[...]
Herzog & de Meuron, 1993

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