Yellow House

The remodeling of a 19th-century structure in Flims by Valerio Olgiati represents a drastic change in its character. The Yellow House, situated right by the curving roadway, has the greatest influence on the cultural environment of a town that is otherwise concealed from view. This promise is realized by the restored building's stunning presence: a timeless, richly textured surface holding construction markings, painted white overall to emerge as a wonderfully abstract volume. The Yellow Residence is the final relic of its previous incarnation as a bourgeois town house with Neoclassical aesthetic pretensions.

Olgiati's father, an architect himself, donated the ancient building to Flims on the condition that it be restored into an exhibition space, painted white, and covered with a traditional stone slab roof. These constraints are radicalized by Olgiati's design. The building's exterior was stripped of ornamentation, the entrance was moved horizontally, and any extraneous apertures were covered in to create an apparently neutral grid of windows. The inside of the building (finished in 1999) was gutted and reconstructed in bleached timber, with the eccentric internal structure dividing the open plan into four unequal regions based on the orientation of the ceiling beams. The dramatic collision between this structure and the central roof geometry culminates in a "broken" pillar on the top level, reflecting the power of defying scholarly preconceptions.

Location: Ringstrasse 8, 8884 Oberterzen