Tucked in a remote corner of Aragón, between Barcelona and Valencia, the county of Matarraña unfold like a chapter from a Mediterranean tale. Often likened to a “Spanish Tuscany,” the region’s patchwork of terraced hills, olive groves, vineyards, and riverside villages seems to exist slightly outside time – an unlikely backdrop for on of Europe’s most quietly radical architectural experiments: Solo Houses.
Conceived in 2010 by curators Eva Albarrán and Christian Bourdais – also the founders of the contemporary art gallery Albarrán Bourdais in Madrid and Menorca – Solo Houses draws on the spirit of the mid-century Case Study Houses (1945–66) in California. The idea is simple, even utopian: invite today’s most forward-thinking architects to design homes without constraints, and embed them in a 200-hectare expanse of unspoiled landscape bordering a natural park. What emerges is not a retreat, nor quite a collection, but a kind of open-air laboratory of living, suspended between earth and imagination.
Two houses currently stand — one by Chilean studio Pezo von Ellrighshausen, the other by Belgian firm OFFICE KGDVS. Like all in the series, they bear the naming convention Solo plus the name of the architect. Solo Peso, completed in 2013, is a concrete square elevated on stilts, hovering over the terrain like a meditative platform. Rigorous in symmetry and yet deeply sensual in its materiality, the house encloses a central pool and courtyard in the tradition of Mediterranean domestic space. Verandas with folding glass blur the line between structure and open air, turning the interior into a breathable extension of the landscape. Nearby, Solo Office by OFFICE KGDVS (completed in 2017) takes a circular form – a continuous loop of columns and openable façades surrounding an inner patio garden and swimming pool. The house is porous and paradoxical: monumental yet light, permanent yet open to the wind. It is not so much an object replaces in the forest as a framework through which the forest reveals itself. Solo Houses, however, is not just an architectural enclave. It has evolved into a cultural ecosystem, one that includes the Solo Sculpture Trail – a 3-kilometer route winding through vineyards, olive groves, and oak forest, where art is not displayed but encountered, almost stumbled upon.
Here, too, the premise is to allow to engage directly with nature, far from the white cube. The resulting works – by artists such as Carlos Amorales, Iván Argote, Christian Boltanski, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Jordi Colomer, Claudia Comte, Jose Dávila, Mona Hatoum, Koo Jeong A, Alicja Kwade, Cristina Lucas, Olivier Mosset, Superflex, Sofía Salazar Rosales, Fernando Sánchez Castillo, and Héctor Zamora – are not additions to the landscape, but interventions into it. They call for pause, for presence.
Among the first installations was Koo Jeong O’s OooOoO (2021), a Möbius ring transformed into a sculptural skate park. With sinuous curves and kinetic potential, it functions as both an abstract monument and an invitation to motion – an aesthetic playground open to interpretation, use, or simply wonder.
Claudia Comte contributes two striking works. Five Marble Leaves (2022), originally exhibited at the Jardin des Tuileries during Art Basel Paris, stands just outside the Venta d’Aubert winery. These massive oak-leaf forms suggest the delicate rhythms of the forest, while their marble solidity evokes the permanence of classical sculpture. In Burning Sunset (2023), a mural rendered in digital gradients of red and gold mimics the hypnotic undulation of flame. Painted directly onto a structure embedded in nature, it offers a digital-native meditation on fire, decay, and transformation.
Jose Dávila, known for sculptural studies in balance and mass, offers Los límites de lo posible (2020), a tension-based installation where concrete and stone are locked in silent struggle. His second piece, The Act of Being Together (2022), is made from raw quarried blocks that recall Neolithic assemblies. It does not represent gathering – it is gathering: a contemporary dolmen where the act of placing a stone becomes an existential gesture.
Minimalist icon Olivier Mosset, co-founder of the BMPT group in the 1960s, contributes Untitled (2021), a set of identical stainless-steel benches arrayed in sequence. Reduced to pure form, they quietly assert the right of geometry to exist in dialogue with lichen, birdsong, and shadow. To sit here is not to observe the art, but to inhabit it. As Albarrán and Bourdais put it, the sculpture trail offers “a critical reflection towards a world in degradation, on the verge of collapse, alongside sculptures that suggest new modes of interaction with the environment, materiality, and other forms of life.” Indeed, the works resist monumentality or spectacle; they seem more like proposals than declarations, gestures toward alternate futures.
Solo Houses does not ask to be visited. It asks to be dwelled in—not only in its literal architecture, but in its ethos. This is not a project of escape, but of confrontation: with nature, with scale, with slowness, and with our own assumptions about how to live meaningfully in the world.
