Hourré House

#architecture

Architects: Collectif Encore

Area: 220 m²

Year: 2015

Photographs: Charlotte Gastaut, Michel Bonvin

Lead Architect: Anna Chavepayre

City: Labastide-Villefranche

Country: France

We fell in love in Labastide Villefranche, on the outskirts of the french Basque country. With an old farm, a collapsing vernacular agricultural building.

From outside, the house looked like any farmhouse in the Basque Country, a massive yet unpretentious architecture. When we first opened its main door, we were expecting to come across the usual dark and damp central space called ”Ezkatz”. The roof had collapsed and pulled the upper floor with it, turning the house into a forest whose main room had become a clearing.

”Let’s not change a thing,” we thought.

Manifesto for a living house. In many ways, Hourré epitomises our approach to space, landscape, ways of living, and sense of freedom. Moreover, it stresses the priority that we give to what is already there, what is free, and what is yet to come. Also, unlike a lot of ”one-trick poney” buildings that we see, it's a project that is generous with ideas!

Changing one thing changes everything.  And so we kept the roof’s opening intact and turned the doors into sliding windows mounted on the facades so they disappear when opened. Unlike many architects who intend to recreate sunsets at each project they do, we believe that integrating it into our building is enough (and much cheaper). Doing so, the house changes constantly, through the hours, days, and seasons.

Building for birds, flowers, and plants. There is this picture of a swallow inside the house that we always show when we do conferences. It is a pretty lousy picture. Birds are not easy to shoot. Maybe that’s the unfortunate reason why we talk much more about how windows look like instead of making a place for the birds so they can be part of the house. And the same goes for flowers as well as any other plants.

What we want is free: Eco-Services.  In winter, the sun directly heats the 70 cm thick stone walls and an air/water heat pump heats up the floor. The walls then turn the house into a stove. The inertia of the uninsulated walls allows the house to fully breathe, silently since there’s no CMV system (some of us have forgotten that air flows naturally without any engine nor electricity).

And in summer ? Well last June, as France recorded a 40° heatwave, the house visitors were asking whether there was any AC to get such a cool room temperature. That’s the magic of these thick stone walls that have not been insulated. Keeping the inertia intact and freshness all summer long.

do you think Lightning or any other Bitcoin-based payment system will ever achieve mainstream adoption? why do you think so?

That's how I see it as well, it's not going to happen in the short term and I've come to terms with the fact that it might never happen. I think huge established payment networks like Visa and Mastercard won't be replaced and will likely ride the stablecoin/cbdc wave due to their huge network effects, I don't see them going away anytime soon.

I'll for sure keep saving in Bitcoin for the reason you outline but we gotta be real, the original goal and ethos of Bitcoin hasn't materialized. I even think that spending Bitcoin is irrational if you have acces to fiat or stablecoins.

Really enjoy your levelheaded, rational and nuanced takes!

nostr.com had another lick of paint. Thanks @fiatjaf 🙏.

Striking the balance between attractive to devs, easy for newbs, not to corp/capturey is very tricky, but I think it's there now. 🔥

When people Google nostr it's where they land, so extremely important we get it right.

Let's talk business models

what are really novel ways to start businesses with nostr, and with all the other people that dedicate time to it?

can we collect them here for the interest of anyone curious

doesn't work

Did you know that openAI's viral new image model is now available on PPQ?

No credit cards!

No subscriptions!

Pay per use!

Private!

At routstr were building the first marketplace to buy and sell LLM APIs using cashu tokens.

Using our proxy you can monetize any OpenAI API compatible LLM server on a per token basis at msat precision (e.g. your local hosted LlamaCPP server)

As User you can just put a cashu note into the api-key field of your llm application and as long as the balance lasts, you can leave the same note.

We dont have everything build out yet and soon we’re getting the marketplace onto nostr so people can list their own nodes.

To then ensure trust and quality we are working on a separate evaluation system so you know which nodes provide a good service.

What happens to images sent in private chats and stored on blossom servers: Do they get encrypted?