Hasta La Ideas

Le Studio Assemblage a fait cette maison familiale de 2 étages à Las Vegas, en plein désert du Nevada. La Résidence Tresarca mêle les matières, le gris et le bois, le tout dans le cadre paisible d’une terrasse avec une piscine infinie. La maison est à découvrir en images dans la suite.

This all-black house in the Yucca Valley desert was designed by Los Angeles office Oller & Pejic to look “like a shadow” (+ slideshow).

Located within the borders of the Joshua Tree National Park, where sunlight is often painfully harsh, Desert House was designed by husband and wife architects Monica Oller and Tom Pejic as a volume that would be easy to rest the eyes on.

They explained: “Our client had given us a brief but compelling instruction at the start of the process – to build a house like a shadow.”

Despite its remote rural location, the house was constructed on a site that had been flattened in the 1960s. This meant the building couldn’t be staggered down the slope and was instead designed with a mostly level floorplate that ends at the edge of a precipice.

“The house would replace the missing mountain that was scraped away, but not as a mountain, but a shadow or negative of the rock,” said the architects, explaining how they imagined the design early on in the process.

The two wings of the house sprawl out across the site, framing various outdoor spaces. A courtyard is sandwiched between the bedrooms and living spaces, while a swimming pool sits in the south-east corner and a sheltered triangular patio points northwards.

“We wanted the experience of navigating the house to remind one of traversing the site outside,” added Oller and Pejic.

The open-plan living room and kitchen forms the the largest space of the house. Floor-to-ceiling windows open the space out to the courtyard and offer panoramic views of the vast desert landscape.

Both this space and the adjoining bedroom wing feature black walls inside as well as out, intended to create a “cave-like feeling”.

“During the day, the interior of the house recedes and the views are more pronounced. At night the house completely dematerialises and the muted lighting and stars outside blend to form an infinite backdrop for contemplation,” said the architects.

Here’s a project description from Oller & Pejic:

Black Desert House

Oller & Pejic Architecture is a husband and wife architecture partnership located in Los Angeles, California.

This project began with an e-mail and a meeting in fall of 2008 for a house in Yucca Valley, which is located near Palm Springs, east of Los Angeles in the high desert near the Joshua Tree National Park.

We had completed two projects in Yucca Valley and occasionally received inquiries about projects in the desert. In the midst of the economic downturn typically these inquiring led nowhere. We had just had our second child and things were looking rather uncertain. We decided to meet with Marc and Michele Atlan to see if their project was a reality. Even from the first communications, Marc’s enthusiasm was noticeable.

After the first meeting, we found that we shared a common aesthetic and process and after seeing the property we knew this was a project like nothing else we had done, really almost a once in a lifetime opportunity. There was no looking back, we immediately began work on the house.

Beyond the technical and regulatory challenges of building on the site – several previous owners had tried and given up – there was the challenge of how to build appropriately on such a sublime and pristine site. It is akin to building a house in a natural cathedral.

Our client had given us a brief but compelling instruction at the start of the process – to build a house like a shadow. This had a very specific relevance to the desert area where the sunlight is often so bright that the eye’s only resting place is the shadows.

Unfortunately, the site had been graded in the 1960s when the area was first subdivided for development. A small flat pad had been created by flattening several rock outcroppings and filing in a saddle between the outcroppings. To try to reverse this scar would have been cost prohibitive and ultimately impossible. It would be a further challenge to try to address this in the design of the new house. The house would be located on a precipice with almost 360 degree views to the horizon and a large boulder blocking views back to the road.

A long process of research began with the clients showing us images of houses they found intriguing – mostly contemporary houses that showed a more aggressive formal and spatial language than the mid-century modern homes that have become the de-facto style of the desert southwest.

We looked back at precedents for how architects have dealt with houses located in similar topography and found that generally they either sought to integrate the built work into the landscape, as in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and later Rudolf Shindler or to hold the architecture aloof from the landscape as in the European modernist tradition of Mies van der Rohe. While on a completely virgin site, the lightly treading minimalist approach would be preferred, here we decided that the Western American tradition of Land Art would serve as a better starting point, marrying the two tendencies in a tense relationship with the house clawing the ground for purchase while maintaining its otherness.

The house would replace the missing mountain that was scraped away, but not as a mountain, but a shadow or negative of the rock; what was found once the rock was removed, a hard glinting obsidian shard.

Concept in place, we began fleshing out the spaces and movement through the house. We wanted the experience of navigating the house to remind one of traversing the site outside. The rooms are arranged in a linear sequence from living room to bedrooms with the kitchen and dining in the middle, all wrapping around a inner courtyard which adds a crucial intermediate space in the entry sequence and a protected exterior space in the harsh climate.

The living room was summed up succinctly by Marc as a chic sleeping bag. The space, recessed into the hillside with a solid earthen wall to lean your back against as you survey the horizon is a literal campsite which finds its precedent in the native cliff dwellings of the south west.

The dark colour of the house interior adds to the primordial cave-like feeling. During the day, the interior of the house recedes and the views are more pronounced. At night the house completely dematerialises and the muted lighting and stars outside blend to form an infinite backdrop for contemplation.

The project would never have come about without the continued efforts of the entire team. The design was a collaborative effort between Marc and Michele and the architects. The patience and dedication of the builder, Avian Rogers and her subcontractors was crucial to the success of the project. Everyone who worked on the project knew it was something out of the ordinary and put forth incredible effort to see it completed.

The post Oller & Pejic’s Desert House designed
to look “like a shadow” appeared first on Dezeen.

American artist Phillip K Smith III has added mirrors to the walls of a desert shack in California to create the illusion that you can see right through the building (+ movie).

Entitled Lucid Stead, the installation was created by Phillip K Smith III on a 70-year-old wooden residence within the California High Desert.

Mirrored panels alternate with weather-beaten timber siding panels to create horizontal stripes around the outer walls, allowing narrow sections of the building to seemingly disappear into the vast desert landscape.

“Lucid Stead is about tapping into the quiet and the pace of change of the desert,” said Smith. “When you slow down and align yourself with the desert, the project begins to unfold before you. It reveals that it is about light and shadow, reflected light, projected light, and change.”

The door and windows of the building are also infilled with mirrors, but after dark they transform into brightly coloured rectangles that subtly change hue, thanks to a system of LED lighting and an Arduino computer system.

“The colour of the door and window openings are set at a pace of change where one might question whether they are actually changing colours,” said Smith.

“One might see blue, red, and yellow… and continue to see those colours. But looking down and walking ten feet to a new location reveals that the windows are now orange, purple and green,” he added.

White light is projected through the walls of the cabin at night, revealing the diagonal cross bracing that forms the building’s interior framework.

Read on for a project description from the artist:

Artist Phillip K Smith, III creates Lucid Stead light installation in Joshua Tree, CA

After the long, dusty, bumpy, anxious trip out into the far edges of Joshua Tree, you open your car door and for the first time experience the quiet of the desert. It’s at that point that you realise you are in a place that is highly different than where you just came from.

Lucid Stead is about tapping into the quiet and the pace of change of the desert. When you slow down and align yourself with the desert, the project begins to unfold before you. It reveals that it is about light and shadow, reflected light, projected light, and change.

In much of my work, I like to interact with the movement of the sun so that the artwork is in a constant state of change from sunrise to 9am to noon to 3am to 6pm and into the evening.

With Lucid Stead, the movement of the sun reflects banded reflections of light across the desert landscape, while various cracks and openings reveal themselves within the structure. Even the shifting shadow of the entire structure on the desert floor is as present as the massing of the shack itself, within the raw canvas of the desert.

The desert itself is as used as reflected light…as actual material within this project. It is a medium that is being placed onto the skin of the 70-year old homesteader shack.

The reflections, contained within their crisp, geometric bands and rectangles contrasts with the splintering bone-dry wood siding.

This contrast is a commonality in my work, where I often merge highly precise, geometric, zero tolerance forms with material or experience that is highly organic or in a state of change…something that you cannot hold on to… that slips between your fingers.

Projected light emerges at dusk and moves into the evening. The four window openings and the doorway of Lucid Stead all become crisp rectangular fields of colour, floating in the desert night.

White light, projected from the inside of the shack outward, highlights the cracks between the mirrored siding and the wood siding, wrapping the shack in lines of light. This white light reveals, through silhouette, the structure of the shack itself as the 2×4’s and diagonal bracing become present on the skin of the shack.

The colour of the door and window openings are set at a pace of change where one might question whether they are actually changing colours. One might see blue, red, and yellow… and continue to see those colours. But looking down and walking ten feet to a new location reveals that the windows are now orange, purple and green.

This questioning of and awareness of change, ultimately, is about the alignment of this project with the pace of change occurring within the desert. Through the process of slowing down and opening yourself to the quiet, only then can you really see and hear in ways that you normally could not.

The post Lucid Stead installation by Phillip K Smith III
makes a desert cabin appear transparent appeared first on Dezeen.

L’édition 2013 de Burning Man organisée comme chaque année dans le désert de Black Rock au Nevada vient de se terminer. On vous présente quelques uns des projets éphémères qui ont vu le jour durant le festival et qui ont été immortalisés par Jim Urquhart et Andy Barron. Plus d’images dans la suite.

Coup de cœur pour les travaux du photographe allemand Mattias Heiderich qui aime composer des clichés très épurés. En résulte cette récente série appelée « Kali ». Des clichés de roches et de sable à la limite du surréaliste, avec un rendu impressionnant, comme si le temps s’était arrêté. A découvrir dans la suite.