Hasta La Ideas

This gabled steel shed surrounded by crops is a self-sufficient farmhouse in Ontario by architects Studio Moffitt (+ slideshow).

Above: photograph is by Shai Gil

Surrounded on every side by corn, wheat, barley and hay fields, House on Limekiln Line is a two-storey house on a ten-hectare estate in Huron Country.

Above: photograph is by Shai Gil

Studio Moffit used galvanised steel cladding to make reference to the local agricultural vernacular. Wooden decks are positioned on three of the four elevations and include one that branches out like a jetty.

Above: photograph is by Shai Gil

The house was completed on a design-and-build contract, which involved architect Lisa Moffitt living on-site during the construction process.

“To me, the most interesting aspect of the project was moving to the site, acting as general contractor and working with local farmers to build it,” Moffitt told Dezeen. “It was a very satisfying experience collaborating with honest, hard-working ‘people of the land’.”

Above: photograph is by Shai Gil

The residence is entirely off-grid and generates all its own electricity and heating using solar panels on the roof, as well as from passive heating systems. Windows are triple-glazed to prevent heat from escaping, while the concrete floor acts as a thermal mass.

Above: photograph is by Shai Gil

In the warm summer months a canopy helps to shades the southern elevation from direct sunlight, while windows on every elevation can be opened to encourage cross-ventilation. Water is sourced from a well beside the house.

Other farmhouses completed in recent years include a contemporary interpretation of a traditional Hungarian peasant house and a house on a sheep farm in Tasmania.

See more architecture in Canada, including a curvaceous pair of twisted skyscrapers.

Photography is by Gabriel Li, apart from where otherwise stated.

Here’s some extra details from Studio Moffit:

House On Limekiln Line, Huron County, Ontario, Canada

The House on Limekiln Line sits on a 25 acre farm lot in Huron County, Ontario. The site is in constant flux due to shifting diurnal and annual conditions tied to weather, cultivation and occupation. The house sits lightly on the land while registering and amplifying specific conditions of this vast productive landscape: it frames expansive views of the shifting crop quilts adjacent to the house and it acts as a datum to an existing topographic shift on the site. The house is calibrated to allow views into and through the house, facilitating an interior visual spatial expansion. An extended south deck and west deck walk offer threshold spaces that extend this experiential choreography while also mediating between enclosure and exposure and extending seasonal exterior occupation of the site.

The house is off-grid and utilises a number of sustainable measures. These measures reduce both operational and embodied energy consumption, and are integrated into a cohesive design. Siting and orientation facilitate passive heating and cooling. A generous south deck overhang blocks summer sun while allowing winter sun to heat the concrete thermal mass floor. Evenly distributed operable windows facilitate summer cross-ventilation and stack effect heat purging. Triple glazed windows, a highly insulated envelope detailed to reduce thermal bridging, and the use of high efficiency appliances ensure that energy consumption required to service the house is low.

The house offers back to the cultural landscape in which it sits. The architectural language of the exterior, a monolithic galvanised steel shed, is informed by the local agricultural vernacular to ensure visual coherence within the landscape and to facilitate construction with locally available and sourced materials. As a design-build project, construction was completed largely by local farmers familiar with agricultural building practices.The rich dialogue with local craftsman ensured that the house is rooted in the building practices and conventions of context while also offering the community exposure to innovative resource and energy-conserving construction practices.

Above: floor plans – click above for larger image and key

The interior of the 925 sf house is composed of a core of service spaces floating within the shed shell. Carefully calibrated views into and through this core ensure that, despite its limited footprint, the house is visually expansive. This experiential choreography, along with careful siting, with crops growing to enclosure, allow the house to act as a place of observation, a space that defers to and reflects back the annually and diurnally shifting landscape beyond. Creating a dialogue with and respect for the local culture and landscape encourages a sense of stewardship towards the larger ecological and environmental processes of the vast agricultural landscape in which the house sits.

Above: long section

The post House on Limekiln Line
by Studio Moffitt appeared first on Dezeen.

Slideshow: this glass pavilion on the edge of a lake in Ontario, Canada, houses a studio, apartment and boathouse for a photographer and was designed by Toronto Studio gh3.

A dark granite plinth supports the glazed upper walls of the building, spanning the height between ground level and the water’s edge.

Boats are stored inside this supporting structure, while the studio and residence are located on the upper floor and mezzanine above.

During warmer weather the glazed walls of the building can slide open for ventilation, while more sliding walls provide separation inside the house between the studio and en suite bedroom.

You can see more projects in Canada here, including a group of plywood skating shelters.

Photography is by Larry Williams.

The text below is from gh3:

Photographer’s Studio over a boat house on Stoney Lake is a reimagination of the archetypal glass house in a landscape.

A continuation of thinking about this architectural ambition, the central conceit of the glass house is reconceived through a contemporary lens of sustainability, program, site and amenity.

The compelling qualities of simple, open spaces; interior and exterior unity; and material clarity are transformed to enhance the environmental and programmatic performance of the building, creating an architecture of both iconic resonance and innovative context–driven design.

The program envisions a building as north–facing window: a photographer’s live/work studio that is continuously bathed in diffuse and undiminished natural light.

The transparent facade—a continuous curtain wall glazed in Cradle to Cradle–certified Starphire glass—becomes the essential element in a photographic apparatus to produce images unobtainable in a conventional studio.

The availability and fidelity of north–facing light in the double-height space provide the photographer with unparalleled natural illumination, while the clarity of the glazing transforms the site and surrounding vistas into a sublime, ever–changing backdrop.

The compact glass form sits at the water’s edge on a granite plinth whose matte black facade dematerializes to suspend the building, lantern-like, on the site.

The granite’s thermal mass exploits the abundant solar input, eliminating the need for active systems on winter days, while the lakefront site allows the use of a deep-water exchange to heat and cool the building year–round through radiant slabs and recessed perimeter louvers at the floor and ceiling.

Sliding panes in the glass skin—three metres wide at the ground floor, and one and a half metres wide on the mezzanine floor—allow the facade become completely porous for natural ventilation, while an individually automated blind system, white roof, and deciduous hedgerow guard against excessive solar gain.

The continuous blind system additionally serves as a second aesthetic skin, transforming the interior into an enclosed, intimate space, and the exterior into a gently reflective mirror of the surroundings.

Entry into the site is facilitated through a minimalist landscape that deploys endogenous materials while leaving the greatest portion of the site in its evocative, glacier-scoured state.

A simple granite plinth serves as threshold for the south-facing entrance, where solid program functions and vertical circulation are arranged in a narrow, efficient volume.

From the outset, the goal was too accommodate the clients programme within a small footprint, so domestic functions are integrated into a furniture-like mezzanine assembly suspended above the main space, where bedroom, bathroom and closet are coextensive, and sliding fritted glass allows the whole to be concealed from the rest of the space.

Throughout the upper and lower levels, interior partitions are clad with seamless white lacquered panels whose reflective qualities diffuse light into every part of the interior and create complex layered views through the space.