News: A team of researchers from Harvard University has developed a team of robots that can build architectural structures based on the behaviour of termites.
Modelled on the way the insects build huge and complex mounds, the little bricklayers individually follow a set of predetermined rules, working without a design plan and without communicating with each other.
Each one has hooked wheels and a front lever to move material, and uses sensors to tell when it’s alongside another robot or a brick in order to negotiate the ever-changing environment of a construction site.
“There is a lot of interest in the field of bio-inspired robotics these days, and I think the possibility of inspiration from termite colonies, which provide such a great example of a giant work force of individually simple and expendable agents, but together comprising a fantastically resilient system, is very exciting,” said the study’s co-author, Kirstin Peterson.
Termites build complex structures without an idea of the overall design by picking up earth and moving it to a location according to a set of rules. If that location is filled, they move on.
Similarly, the robots have no program to tell them what they are building, simply a set of traffic rules telling them which direction to move in. This means that if one of the robots breaks down, they just build around it. They will also never trap themselves inside the building structure.
The Harvard University researchers revealed the results of their research by making the robots build a small castle. Although the work is slow, they say the self-directing robots are ideal for building in dangerous or hostile environments such as earthquake areas, war zones, under the sea or on uninhabited planets.
Foliage is scattered around the interior of this hotel in Berlin by designers Studio Aisslinger to create an “urban jungle” (+ slideshow).
Studio Aisslinger incorporated plants throughout the interior of the 149-room 25hours Bikini Berlin Hotel, located inside the listed 1950s Bikini-Haus building close to Berlin Zoo. “The [hotel] is as diverse as the big city it is located in and as wild as a jungle,” said the studio.
Walls of planters partition communal areas and bags filled with vegetation are hung from the ceiling sporadically.
Plants also climb through windows and doorways of the greenhouse-like restaurant.
The bar is stocked with bottles displayed in metal backed with wire mesh and drinkers can relax on large steps that double as seating.
Illuminated room numbers hang above doors along dark corridors with exposed concrete ceilings. Similar lettering marks communal areas such as the lounge.
Decorative features in the bedrooms include copper headboards and illustrations on the walls.
The hotel also boasts a sauna overlooking the Tiergarten park and a rooftop terrace with 360-degree views of the city.
25hours Bikini Berlin Hotel is due to open later this week. Photographs are copyright 25 Hours.
Here’s some more information from the designers:
25hours Bikini Berlin Hotel – Urban Jungle
25hours Hotel Bikini Berlin celebrates its grand opening on the 20th and 21st of February, 2014 in the heart of Berlin. Together with Restaurant Neni Berlin and Monkey Bar the new hotel on the bor- der between city and jungle is going wild.
The 25hours Hotel Bikini Berlin is as diverse as the big city it is located in and as wild as a jungle. The hotel showcases cosmopolitan Berlin at its location in the listed Bikini-Haus building between the Tiergarten park and Breitscheidplatz with Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. The hotel is popular not only among its own guests thanks to the restaurant and bar on the top floor with a 360° rooftop terrace and first-class views of the city and the Tiergarten park.
Neni restaurant
Neni Berlin is the place to come for indulgence, be it a diverse breakfast, a light lunch or a more extensive evening meal. In keeping with the urban jungle theme, it can be found in a striking green- house built out of parts of old hothouses. The restaurant draws its inspiration from cuisines from all over the world and is a place to meet and sample and enjoy a little of everything.
Rooftop terrace
The rooftop terrace is the highlight of the whole hotel thanks to the breathtaking view of western Berlin and the tree canopy in the Tiergarten park. It surrounds NENI Berlin on three sides and also Monkey Bar, with its six-metre full-length windows. The view and the location speak for themselves.
Monkey bar
Monkey Bar is located right next to the restaurant on the tenth floor and is an evening and night-time hotspot for top drinks and sophisticated bar food created by NENI. The NENI Berlin world of herbs has also found its way into the bar and its cocktail creations. With its outdoor enclosure, Monkey Bar is the coolest place in which to watch the sun set and enjoy music events.
Bikini island
The Wohnzimmer lounge at the 25hours Hotel Bikini Berlin comprises multiple areas. The Working Lab, Bikini Island and DJ corner segue from one to the other and transpose Berlin’s diversity right to the heart of the hotel. People can work, relax and chat here side by side. The aim is to create a space that provides a little time out from work and productive discussions.
Work hard, stay calm and enjoy tonight
Extraordinary settings result in extra special events. The 25hours Hotel Bikini Berlin boasts unique function rooms with a great deal of atmosphere: the three rooms come alive thanks to the interplay of transparency and being obscured from view. The two Microhouses and the Freiraum function room are the perfect places for workshops and conventional meetings. And together with the NENI Berlin restaurant, Monkey Bar and the rooftop terrace, they constitute an extra special event option. Free Wi-Fi is available to the guests throughout the hotel.
Fashion brand Pringle of Scotland has incorporated laser-sintered nylon fabric into garments for its Autumn Winter 2014 collection, shown yesterday at London Fashion Week.
Pringle of Scotland collaborated with material scientist Richard Beckett to create a series of 3D-printed fabrics for the collection using selective laser sintering (SLS).
To produce textiles that could move like traditional cloths, Beckett chose specific machinery that could create the tiny nylon parts needed to keep the material flexible.
“I used an EOS Formiga P100 SLS system due to its ability to build at high definition, one of the few systems that would allow you to build such complex movable parts at this size,” Beckett told Dezeen.
The printed sections were then handwoven into the knitwear through small hooks on the underside or stitched on top of the wool.
Bands of the material formed cuffs for jackets while larger elements created diamond-shaped Argyle patterns across pullovers and sleeveless tops.
3D-printed garments have previously appeared in Haute Couture fashion collections by designers such as Iris van Herpen and a bespoke garment for Dita Von Teese, but Pringle of Scotland claims that this is the first time the technology has been used for ready to wear.
“I wanted to explore a move away from the more sculptural costume approach of such pieces, towards a more material, haptic-based approach,” said Pringle of Scotland head of design Massimo Nicosia.
The Autumm Winter 2014 collection was presented during this season’s London Fashion Week, which concludes tomorrow.
Australian studio BLOXAS adopted elements from Japanese architecture to reorganise the spaces of this Melbourne residence around a courtyard then added a new timber-clad extension shaped like a periscope (+ slideshow).
Located in the suburb of Fitzroy North, the renovated open-plan house was designed by BLOXAS to provide a “dynamic mix of spaces” for a family of four who had previously spent many years living and working in Japan.
The building has an L-shaped plan that wraps around the long north-facing courtyard. A wooden deck runs along the edge of the lawn as an imitation of the traditional Japanese engawa – a narrow veranda – and prompted the residence to be named Engawa House.
“This design was structured around the concept of engawa,” explained architect and studio principal Anthony Clarke. “This space offers a transition between the yielding comfort of the grassed courtyard and the polished concrete floor of the interior.”
Three red brick chimneys belonging to the old structure are dotted through the house. One sits along the street-facing southern elevation, forming a visual break between the white-painted weatherboards cladding the original house and the black-stained plywood walls of the extension.
Comparing the building to a red brick factory across the street, Clarke added: “The black stained plywood exterior of the facade will age sympathetically with the warehouses surrounding it, offering a unique composition against the retained brickwork fireplace.”
Living, dining and kitchen areas occupy a large rectilinear space at the centre of the house and can be opened out to the courtyard by sliding back a series of floor-to-ceiling glass doors.
A staircase leads up from the living room to a mezzanine study, from which residents can survey activities going on beneath them.
New timber-framed windows puncture the facade and a bathroom wraps around another of the old chimneys.
Read on for a project description from Anthony Clarke of BLOXAS:
Engawa House
Melbourne’s inner-north has a distinct European feel of community living. Small houses compel people towards local parks and curbside gardens, blurring the threshold between public and private. The Engawa House in North Fitzroy, embraces this atmosphere, as the dynamic and historical patchwork of the surrounding context becomes part of each living space.
The clients, a family of four, described a space offering them a feeling of discovery, through a variety of intersecting planes, and the layering of natural light. They required a relocated central bathroom, kitchen, dining, living, additional bedroom with ensuite, as well as a mezzanine office and external entertaining area.
A full facing northern wing, mixing a combination of single and double storey forms, attaches itself to the front rooms of the existing house. The simple orientation takes advantage of the full range of views from the mezzanine, whilst being sympathetic to its elevational context. The living, dining and bedroom/en suite skirt a large and long courtyard garden, maximising sustainable performance, and offering northern light into each new program.
This design was structured around the concept of “Engawa”, referring to an exterior hallway on the side of a traditional Japanese dwelling. This space offers a transition between the yielding comfort of the grassed courtyard and the polished concrete floor of the interior. It also offers a transitional space for informal seating.
The open living and mezzanine enhance a visual and auditory connection, with a distinct lack of privacy, embracing the family’s already strong connection.
Rather than competing with the streetscape, BLOXAS utilised council restrictions to invite exploration yet maintain integrity. The striking black form signposts the street corner and its palette of styles.
The Engawa House interplays scale and height, contributing to the elevational rhythm of the red factory brickwork, single-storey weatherboard terraces and the multi-storey residential context.
Large timber windows to the southern boundary invite the engagement between neighbouring residents and the clients of the Engawa House.
Underpinning the projects conceptual idea was a very tight budget. The addition provides a smaller overall footprint than the previous plan, now maximising the site’s potential. The black stained plywood exterior of the facade will age sympathetically with the warehouses surrounding it, offering a unique composition against the retained brickwork fireplace. This facilitated a high quality interior where the client desired a more minimal and refined finish.
Architect: Black Line One X Architecture Studio Location: Fitzroy North, Melbourne, Australia Builder: Zachary Spark Constructions Project Year: 2013 Furniture: Ross Gardam, Earl Pinto
The Marcel Wanders: Pinned Up book has been published to accompany the exhibition of the same name celebrating 25 years of Wanders‘ career, which opened at the Stedelijk Museum on 1 February.
Projects highlighted in the exhibition such as the 1996 Knotted Chair are detailed in the compendium, along with essays about Wanders’ work and his impact on the design world.
The book also includes a list of all the products, interiors, art direction projects and other designs completed by Wanders since his student days.
Designed and published by Frame, the 224-page volume is available in both Dutch and English.
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Competition closes 17 March 2014. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.
Norwegian firm Eriksen Skajaa Architects has redesigned the offices of the team behind the Bergen International Festival, creating an environment that’s meant to resemble the backstage areas of a concert.
Eriksen Skajaa Architects created an open-plan office over two floors for the Bergen International Festival, a music and cultural jamboree held in Bergen each summer. This is in contrast to the old offices, which were in a bank and made up of individual rooms.
The designers say the open-plan design is more suited to the company’s fluctuating staff numbers and activity in the buildup to the festival throughout the year.
Eriksen Skajaa Architects said its design aesthetic drew on the idea that the offices are like the backstage or workshop for the festival itself.
The studio used a birch wooden framework, polished concrete floors, and black and white walls. Partitions of wooden shelving and vertical wooden fins along glass walls are intended to give the feeling of being in a workshop.
“We have focused on a production logic where it must be clear that this is a place where you make something,” said the architects. “Hence the element of wooden framework which can give the feeling that the project is not fully completed.”
The firm also made it possible for the festival staff to host small concerts and exhibitions in the new offices and designed the canteen so that it doubles as an auditorium.
The rest of the offices also include two meeting rooms, a box of shelving concealing the stairwell, two private offices and a small padded seat built into the shelving.
The bronze bust of the festival’s founder, singer Fanny Elster, is displayed in a backlit niche within the wooden shelving grid.
Workshop illustration
The company sourced its furniture from Scandinavian companies such as Design Office, Vitra and Artek, and lighting from Zero and Fagerhult.
The Bergen International Festival was established in 1953 and features performances in music, theatre, dance and visual arts.
Meeting room illustration
Photography is by Rasmus Norlander. Illustrations by Eriksen Skajaa Architects.
Here’s more from the architects.
The workshop behind the scenes
Interiors for the Bergen International Festival in Vaskerelvsmauet 6, Bergen, Norway.
Background
Bergen International Festival is a music and cultural festival to be held in Bergen in late May and early June each year. The festival is the largest of its kind and contains a wide range of events in music, theatre, dance and visual arts at the national and international level. Concerts are held in the Grieg Hall and Haakon’s Hall, in the four composer homes on Siljustøl, Trolhaugen, Lysøen and Valestrandsfossen as well as in a number of city churches, streets and squares. The first festival was held in 1953.
The festival’s former premises were in an older bank building with large individual offices and for their new offices wanted open plan offices for increasingly project based work.
We have therefore prepared a project with a high degree of flexibility. The use of the premises changes during the year with a shift from planning period to the festival period in which both the activity and number of employees increases. It requires flexibility both in the workforce and in the use of the premises. We also proposed to facilitate the ability to organise small concerts and exhibitions in the new premises and that way linking the festival as an organisation closer to the events they hold.
We established early some basic ideas for the premises: the festival offices imagined as workshops where the festival is made, but also the activity behind the scenes of what’s happening in front of the curtain. We have focused on a production logic where it must be clear that this is a place where you make something. Hence the element of wooden framework which can give the feeling that the project is not fully completed, and glass walls with frames and profiles hidden from the outside so that the boxes rather look like open spaces. We have otherwise had a clear Scandinavian focus on the materiality and furniture selection, while the festival wanted to stand clear in context with the Grieg Hall, Bergen Art Museums and theatre.
Layout
We have drawn the plans so that the rooms have some organising elements such as meeting rooms and the shelf-box around the stairwell. We have had a focus on keeping the lines and let the walls align with each other to create a neat and orderly plan.
On the 5th floor are two flexible rooms for different uses: offices for project jobs and dining room. On the same floor there are also two meeting rooms, rest rooms, toilets, storage, wardrobe for guests and a printer room. The dining room can both be divided with loose walls and used as a concert hall with a stage toward the stair core, or as used today with a grand piano placed at one end wall.
On the 6th floor open plan offices are reorganised around another shelf-box around the stairwell. We also made two closed offices. On the floor there is also a copy rooms and a meeting room that can also serve as a place for temporary employees.
Material palette is kept very simple and consists of a polished concrete floor, black and white walls with recessed plinth and either fixed plaster ceiling or acoustic hiling with concealed edges and large formats. Many of the rooms in the premises has walls of vertical wooden frameworks of birch with glass system wall behind mounted with concealed fixing. Rooms with wooden frame work have ceiling of birch and birch flooring.
The boxes around the previous round stairwell is in birch veneer with shelves, cabinets and benches and is used as a place to make a phone call or to small meetings. The bronze bust of the festival’s founder, singer Fanny Elster, also got a niche with lighting behind.
The furniture is from: Design Office, Vitra, Artek, Hay and Nikari, while illumination is from Zero and Fagerhult.
Architects: Eriksen Skajaa Architects Project team: Arild Eriksen, Joakim Skajaa, Julia With Size: 450m2 Year: 2013 Client: Bergen International Festival / Gjølanger Bruk
Belgian studio Atelier Tom Vanhee has renovated and extended the brick buildings of a community centre in the village of Westvleteren using a contrasting contemporary brick (+ slideshow).
The site was originally occupied by a disparate cluster of buildings including a nineteenth century school building, a former town hall, a library and a youth club, which the local council asked Atelier Tom Vanhee to transform into a more practical space for community activities.
The poor condition of the facilities and lack of an obvious entrance or consistent elements unifying the buildings led the architect to propose a range of renovations, with brick acting as a common material.
“We used brick because the existing buildings were already a patchwork of different renovations from the past hundred years,” architect Tom Vanhee told Dezeen. “We thought it was beautiful and that we could strengthen this by adding a modern brick.”
The facade of the renovated activity hall shows evidence of former doors and windows that have been removed and filled in with new bricks. An extension made from the same brick replaces the building’s old gabled roof and incorporates new windows.
“The things we changed we filled in with bricks so you can see what we did,” Vanhee explained. “It also relates to the historical renovations that you can see elsewhere in the site.”
To create a more obvious and practical entrance for the community centre the architects removed a derelict storage building and extended the space housing a small concert hall to create a corner enclosing a courtyard that can be used for outdoor events.
A glass and steel box projecting from the brick wall signals the new entrance, which leads into a space that connects the previously separate facilities of the centre.
The windows running along the upper section of the white-painted activity room’s wall fill the space with light and provide views of the nearby church.
Materials throughout the interior were chosen based on their sustainable credentials, including FSC-certified timber used for the staircase and the highly insulated new windows.
The architects also added a green roof that reduces heat from solar gain in the summer and prevents any damage to the ceiling from heavy rainfall.
The meeting centre offers accommodation to various community activities. The complex of buildings consists of successive constructions, ranging from a 19th century school building and an old town hall to an industrial construction from the 1990s.
The dilapidated storage building makes place for enlargement of the meeting hall. That way the back yard becomes an outdoor space for the party room. The gabled roof is replaced by a single slope roof, making the room and space higher, and bringing a better acoustic sound in the hall. The high windows bring light and give views on the nearby church.
A central entrance in the armpit of the building complex offers the building an address. The entrance hall connects the different functions and spaces. The use of different types of bricks betray the successive renovations in the past. The new added walls in contemporary bricks build in the recent renovation strengthens the patchwork of different bricks. The meeting centre is so adapted to the modern requirements, with respect for the environment and the users, but also with a whimsical character.
A green roof keeps the meeting hall cool in summer, increases the sustainability of the epdm membrane of the roof, and constitutes a buffer for heavy rainfall. The new toilets are supplied with recycled rain water from the existing buildings.
Materials are chosen by the score at their circle of life analysis. The used wood is FSC-labelled : the structure of the light interior walls, the windows, extra wooden bars for floors and for fixating isolation. We used fibre boards. The lights are energy efficient. The heating system recuperates the heat of the evacuating gases. We took care of better isolation: we changed all windows in high isolating glass, the roofs or ceilings, the floors and new walls are isolated.
Three mature trees were rooted to the centre of this site in Western Australia, but architecture firm MORQ managed to convince the owners to build their family house around the peeling trunks and burgeoning foliage (+ slideshow).
Located south of Perth in the town of Margaret River, Karri Loop House was constructed around one large Karri tree and a pair of Marri trees – both of which are indigenous to this region of Australia – after MORQ came up with a design that prevented them needing to be chopped down.
The single-storey residence has an H-shaped plan that wraps around the trunks of the three trees and also frames a pair of irregularly shaped courtyards.
To avoid disturbing the delicate shallow roots, the architects raised the house off the ground by positioning it on hand-placed steel tripod footings, rather than digging pile foundations.
Dramatic double-height ceilings and large windows were then added to the living room and master bedroom to “celebrate the presence of the trees” by offering residents views of the leaves and branches overhead.
“These trees, their root systems and their unstable large branches presented a challenge to the build-ability of the house,” said the architects.
“We like to think of this project as a mutually beneficial development; the building is designed to retain the trees, while the trees visually contribute to the quality of the inner space,” they added.
A raised deck runs along the northern side of the house to create an outdoor seating area beneath the canopy of the Karri, while a sheltered triangular terrace at the end of the living room features a vertical window framing another view of the tree.
A rainwater harvesting system is built into the roof, which channels water through to an irrigation system feeding the tree roots.
Plywood clads the inner and outer walls of the house. On the outside, it has a roughly sawn surface coated with a layer of black paint, while interior surfaces have been sanded smooth to reveal the natural grain.
Wooden ceiling beams were left exposed in various rooms inside the building. Straw bales were also added to provide insulation, but are concealed within the walls.
The mature trees located in the middle of the site (a Karri and two Marris) played an essential part in shaping our project. The first part of the design process was spent in investigating the requirements for retaining these trees, as well as convincing the clients of their unique presence on an otherwise anonymous site. With the support of a renowned arborist, the decision was finally made to keep the trees. As a result, the house sits in between the tree-trunks and its outline defines two open courtyards of irregular shape. These embrace the trees and the surrounding landscape, around which family life occurs.
A tall window in the dining area and a periscope-like skillion in the master bedroom, celebrate the presence of the trees from within the house, framing views of both foliage and peeling trunks. These trees, their root systems and their unstable large branches presented a challenge to the build-ability of the house. We like to think of this project as a mutually beneficial development: where the building is designed to retain the trees, while the trees visually contribute to the quality of the inner space.
To protect the integrity of the shallow root-system a matrix of steel tripod footings was used: each of them had to be dug by hand, and repositioned every time a root was encountered, resulting in an irregular structural grid. These footings also raise the house off the ground and give it a somewhat temporary look.
Any part of the house footprint overlapping the root system would result in an uneven rainwater supply to the roots, which could cause a shock to the trees. Rainwater collected on the roof is therefore taken under the house, channelled into a trickling irrigation pipes and then evenly fed to the tree roots.
Lightweight construction seemed the most appropriate response to the existing trees requirements, however straw-bales were chosen as a preferred form of insulation. This decision required all perimeter walls to be prefabricated as ladder-frames and later assembled on site. It also resulted in unusually thick perimeter walls, seldom employed in timber framed buildings.
The house was mainly constructed out of timber, whose grain and texture inform both interior and exterior spaces. Wall linings use different grades of plywood: rough sawn, painted black on the outside, and sanded, clear-treated on the inside. The floor and ceilings are also in clear-treated plywood. The roof structure is resolved with Laminated Veneer Lumber beams, which are left exposed on the inside of the ceiling.
Stockholm 2014: this movie by Swedish brand Massproductions shows how designer Chris Martin’s modular sofa system can be arranged to fit any room.
The Anyway Sofa System by Chris Martin features elements with concave and convex bends of both 30 and 90 degrees, creating flexible arrangements that can fit into awkward spaces.
“I saw a need for a sofa that closely related to the space it found itself in,” said Martin. “The Anyway Sofa complements interior spaces, almost to the point where it becomes part of the architecture.”
The upholstered seating can be ordered with a high or low back and modules include the option to add armrests on either end.
Legs are available in a range of wood and metal finishes. Massproductions exhibited the seating at this year’s Stockholm Furniture Fair, which took place last week.
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.
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