The house in Balsthal is a very rural building; so it's a house in the middle of a forest kind of sitting at a forest but kind of away of the next inhabitant - two kilometres or so.

And when I started to work on this project - I grew up in the city so I understood kind of how lonely it is to live in the countryside. I go in there, because of course I mean there are no bars, there is no library, there is no real people to meet; I mean one literally lives alone. Then I think as a consequence of this - this is also quite, quite a sad condition in a way, but there is also one thing which is really fantastic about the landscape, kind of living in this landscape which is the landscape itself. So I tried to produce a building which has basically two topics. One topic is different possible perceptions of landscape, and the second topic is - I imagine there is always... there is going to be a family living in there, so this other topic is how does our smallest society circle, if it's kind of a place to learn, how could that work?; what is the smallest social form, the one of the family, that could be for that. For the first part, the landscape, I also had this idea that I will build the building, if I have a scheme where I thought I could easily hang out, or be in this, in this apartment, or this house, for a week without exiting, you know it must be good enough that I could imagine it's rich enough to just be in this house for a week, then it's maybe okay to start building it.