Avara House is a residence nestled in the rural landscape of Avara Mountain near Belgrade, Serbia. This project explores how ample space can be transformed into an ideal living environment through thoughtful design.
The house is a single-story structure built atop an existing fruit garden that slopes southward. Its form is a 16×16 meter square composed of 3.2-meter grid frames. The interior features a hollowed-out center measuring 9.6×9.6 meters, exposing the terrain beneath the building. Surrounding surfaces form the usable living areas and define the building’s boundaries.
The framework consists of 80 square millimeter steel pipe profiles, welded and assembled, anchored at a minimum of three foundation points on uneven ground. These support points delineate the accessible ground area and secure two large concrete slabs resembling natural boulders. These slabs create an outdoor garden staircase as well as a garden storage area with an integrated bathroom.
Grass-covered slopes extend between and beneath the houses, creating a natural, shaded outdoor space that integrates the landscape, trees, and ground into the central area of the home. The main floor serves as a new platform to enjoy views of the surrounding forest’s grassy terrain.
The open structure embraces the surrounding landscape, establishing clear geometric boundaries and strong architectural contours. The peripheral grid of the plan acts as the building’s foundational framework, offering views via four connected terraces. Each terrace features distinct surface materials and serves different functions.
Materials such as suspended nets, steel plates, precast concrete slabs, and open frames challenge the steel frame boundaries with their movable elements, continuously redefining the architectural limits.
This design has transformed the scale and atmosphere of the house. The opaque wall facing the central indoor space consists of ten large, rotatable steel doors, allowing the living room to open from a single 50-square-meter indoor area into four outdoor terraces totaling 156 square meters.
Large glass panels on the south facade extend the view of distant hills into the living room. Custom sunshades can enclose this expansive space, creating a private indoor environment divided by floor-to-ceiling drapes into distinct zones such as the kitchen, dining room, living room, and bathroom.
The open floor plan centers on the main living space, with other areas designed around this core. The house reverses traditional spatial priorities, allowing direct views of the surrounding natural scenery from multiple vantage points.
Every element highlights the structural and spatial performance, balancing weight and lightness, expansion and contraction, at key nodes. This is evident in the visible steel frame connections, exposed load-bearing joints, outdoor supports, and raw material finishes, with details revealed gradually, creating a direct architectural experience.
The homeowner, a local craftsman specializing in interior decoration and residential maintenance, commissioned TEN to design, develop, and construct this residence. The architect employed construction techniques well-suited to the locale, while the skilled labor was sourced locally. The owner collaborated closely with nearby metal workshops to complete the work.
The project’s core concept encourages future homeowners to actively participate in the design process. Therefore, the architect specified only local materials and construction expertise, crafting design details focused on durable structures and repairable surfaces. This approach challenges traditional architectural principles, making it impossible to finalize a perfect conceptual model upfront. Instead, the building was directly constructed by the owner on site, fostering a dialogue between architecture, the future, reality, and essential elements.
This collaborative process identified required materials, workshop skills, and capabilities within the nearby area, resulting in innovative solutions such as on-site poured plain concrete foundations and environmentally friendly steel panels. The precision of the framework was determined by indoor carpenters, while a self-compacting concrete mixture developed with local suppliers and contractors was used for pouring.
This building not only supports the local economy but also presents a new model for applying local construction techniques. Many materials are left exposed, highlighting the craftsmanship and labor behind the construction while maintaining a formal architectural expression that celebrates humanism in residential building processes.
This design extends the dialogue started by pioneers of Yugoslav modernism and serves as a foundation for promoting social transformation through localized and autonomous development of advanced design and construction technologies. The Avara House exemplifies how a contemporary ideal residence can utilize everyday materials and be personalized by local craftsmen to create a building rich in regional character and significance.
△ Bottom Floor Plan
△ Second Floor Plan
△ South Elevation View
△ East Elevation View
△ Section A
△ Section B
△ Structural Diagram
Project Information
Project type: Independent residential building
Location: Belgrade, Serbia
Designer: TEN
Area: 156 m²
Year: 2020
Architects: Nemanja Zimonjic, Ognjen Krasna, Jana Kulic, Miodrag Grbic
Photographer: Maxime Delvaux
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