Self-built by the owner’s family, this concrete house overlooks the Pacific Ocean just south of San Francisco. Located on a small hillside site with stringent community zoning restrictions, the home gently contorts to maximize light and view within the complex zoning envelope and design restrictions. The frequently fogbound and chilly site required a sheltering form to provide pleasant indoor/outdoor living, as well as maximum sheltered glazing to bring in sunlight over the shoulder from the rear of the house. For simplicity of appearance and minimization of cost and resource consumption, the house is constructed of just two primary materials inside and out—hammered, site-cast concrete, and sustainably-harvested Peruvian redwood imported and milled on site by the owners. The 12” thick concrete walls are cast monolithically with rigid foam insulation between two reinforced layers of concrete, affording a massive wall exposed inside and out. Windows, doors, flooring and millwork are hand built and finished by the owners on site. The main ceiling is an arcing plane of Peruvian redwood paneling warped from one end to the other in order to follow the natural street slope at the front of the home while tipping down to minimize sunlight shadowing of the uphill property at the rear of the home. A glass clerestory box pierces this warping roof plane, creating a stairway, light and ventilation shaft through the center of the home, and providing access to a roof deck with provisions for concealed photo-voltaic and solar hot water equipment.

B-House in Shimasaki, Kyushu Island, Japan

This two bedroom, one bath home built for two public school teachers on a hillside overlooking Kumamoto, Japan is planned to become fully energy self-sufficient once all designed systems are phased in. The construction budget of US$154,000 an extremely modest budget by local Kumamoto standards—required a close collaboration of the architects and builder to achieve a high-quality, off-site fabricated timber-frame construction meeting high sustainability standards. Rather than eliminating green technology to remain within budget, the 1100 square foot home was planned for a phased integration of systems, budgeted to be completed with the couple’s current income without increased loans over the coming five years. All essential components of the sustainable design strategy are fully implemented in the original construction, including natural, renewable, healthy materials; optimized solar shading, day lighting, and chimney-effect natural ventilation; solar hot water heating; high-efficiency hydronic heating made ready for future geothermal ground loop and solar thermal roof panels; water catchment roof system planned for a future green roof; and efficiently sized spaces and gardens conducive to simple, indoor-outdoor living with minimal ongoing maintenance and resource investment.

The house is sited on a terraced, south-facing slope in a dense housing neighborhood, overlooking orange groves and a spectacular view of Kumamoto Castle and surrounding hills. The building is sited for maximum views and passive solar heating of the massive concrete floor slabs serving as thermal ballast, and with opening walls facing the prevailing summer winds. The north face of the home has a steeply pitched roof section oriented for photovoltaic panels facing south, and high, operable clerestory windows facing north and upslope, creating optimized day lighting without summer heat gain, and creating a chimney-effect natural ventilation draft drawing air through the home, and exhausting the kitchen, bath and sleeping spaces with cooling updrafts. The house is constructed of simple, robust materials, consisting of concrete, plaster, and locally and sustainably harvested timber.

Credits:
Anderson Anderson Architecture, San Francisco; with Nishiyama Architects, Kumamoto Japan

The Kinmont-Hupert Orchard House is a highly site-specific, cast concrete construction, rationally pre-fabricated through the use of a limited set of repeated, modular formwork, and standardized SIPS sandwich panel and pre-fabricated truss framing components. This approach allows a high degree of adaptability to the landscape, while keeping construction costs to a minimum.

Sited within a mature apple orchard in Sonoma County, the house is built in conformity with the strict rectilinear geometry of the tree grid, and equally exploiting the secondary diagonal surprises particular to human motion through an agricultural field. The site was intensely studied for the individual particularities of each unique tree within the orchard field, and the house design then developed this same character of individual conditions within a predominantly regularized system. True to the character of the orchard, the house is laid out as long sequences of interior and exterior courtyards, defined by the adjacent trees, affording long, metered views along the rectilinear and diagonal axes of the field. The massive concrete walls align with the rows of tree trunks, while the open volumes of the rooms and exterior courts align with the open space between trees, affording a direct spatial continuity between house and landscape, figure and void.

The house is a low, single story volume, wheelchair accessible throughout, built with a minimal range of materials: heated concrete slabs, raw concrete primary walls inside and out, with secondary walls and ceiling clad in white drywall on the interior, with galvanized steel on the exterior. Minimal cabinetry and millwork is manufactured of raw Douglas Fir plywood. Windows are fabricated, galvanized steel. The flat roof of the house is low, and kept well below the top limbs of the orchard.

LINK: http://www.dwell.com/articles/fertile-grounds.html

Designed for an anthropologist and a concert pianist, retiring from Phoenix, Arizona, to this small New Mexico town on a desert site fronting the Rio Chama—not far from Georgia O’Keefe’s famous home on the bluff above this house uses several relatively standard prefabrication systems. SIPs are used for the wall panels only, while the roof and floors are constructed of prefabricated 2×4 long-span trusses. Although it was originally intended to use panels as the roof and floor structure as well, the house was switched shortly before construction to a truss system to simplify the assembly and to reduce the structural lumber splines required in the long spans of the panels.
The owners have a number of animals, dogs and cats and occasional injured strays that they were concerned with protecting from the prevalent local hawks, eagles, coyotes, and rattlesnakes. Rather than compromise the design with the addition of a retrofitted chain link dog run, we developed a thoroughly integrated animal house. For budget reasons, local contextualism, and appropriately barnyard practicality, we settled on chain link as a major material system for the house, protecting domestic animals and people from other animals or from accidental falls from the upper terraces.
Chain link is an ingenious prefabricated system that can be rolled out and hung from above like curtains, stretched and bolted to the walls and frames with large, round, specially cut steel washers that can be inexpensively manufactured in quantity and made available as modular parts in the system. In some places the chain link stands away from the house, providing enclosure to exterior living spaces, and in other areas it hugs tight to the steel-siding-clad wall surfaces, providing visual continuity and textural relief to the large flat planes while at the same time providing a trellis for creeping plants that will grow up from the ground to further soften the profile of the house.

Chameleon House: Lake Michigan

This house is a tower rising above the rolling topography of its cherry orchard site, peering outwards toward spectacular westward views of Lake Michigan and the surrounding agricultural landscape. The site is minimally disturbed, other than the mounding of two earthen enclosures adjacent to the tower, created from the excavated earth of the foundation and offering a ground to contrast the tower experience above the treescape. Due to the slope of the site, the family enters at the third level, descending down to the kids’ bedrooms and bath or moving up to the main living spaces which look out over the orchards to Lake Michigan.

A house would appear as an unsympathetic intrusion in this pure landscape, and with its singular vertical presence rising above the orchard, the tower is intended to reflect the austere, scaleless non-particularity of the occasional farm buildings dotted elsewhere on the hills. To help mask the scale, the building is wrapped in a skirting wall of recycled translucent polyethelene slats, standing two feet out from the galvanized sheet metal cladding of the wall surface on aluminum frames that serve also as window washing platforms and emergency exit ladders. The translucent polyethylene material set out over the dully reflective wall cladding is chosen for its ability to gather the light and color of its landscape, dissolving the finely shadowed and haloed structure into the seasonal color cycle of snow, ice and black twig tracery; pale pink blossom clouds; pollen green leaf and grass; golden straw and vivid foliage. The double skin creates a micro-climate and thermal differential around the structure creating a rippling mirage updraft that in the summer sends steaming condensation or in the winter drips melting icicles.

In order to keep costs and on site labor to a minimum, SIPs panels compose the exterior walls.  A steel moment frame allows for the height of the structure and for loft like spaces within the main living area.  With the use of common materials and industrial detailing, a commercial contractor built the home in eight weeks.

This prototype is to be built near Granite Falls, Washington, in the Cascade Mountains about 50 miles north east of Seattle. A second prototype is in the planning stages for an urban site in San Diego. This house is part of a series of projects that explore the opportunities for using prefabrication techniques and new building construction methods and materials to build low cost, high quality, site-adaptable and program-adaptable manufactured buildings.

Although the building site for this prototype has quite unrestrictive zoning constraints, the challenging topography and geotechnical conditions play a strong role in defining the overall design strategy for this project and as a prototype for difficult hillside sites. The small ground floor building footprint/foundation reduces the cost of this expensive area of the house, and allows the points of attachment to adapt to varying slope and soil conditions with minimal disruption of the natural topography.

The building system is a marriage of two common, standardized, mass-produced building elements – a prefabricated steel structural frame (of the type commonly manufactured for light-weight commercial structures), and a structural insulated panel system (SIPS) that provides all non-glazed building envelope areas. Significant economies are achieved by using the same low-labor structural panels for walls, floors and roof. The system is designed around a small number of interchangeable, rearrangeable assemblies for efficiencies of time and cost, and to minimize the environmental impacts of on-site construction.

Although the materials and methods of construction are chosen for efficiency and affordability, the underlying design principles guiding the development of the system have the larger goals of producing affordable, high quality buildings that offer variety, adaptability, convertibility, strength, simplicity, spatial richness, and optimized access to views and light.

Wuhan Blue Sky Prototype seeks to provide a highly rationalized steel construction system that is cost effective; appropriate to the current site, program, and project partner production facilities; and readily adaptable to future diverse sites, programs and environmental conditions. With Living Steel’s coordination, the Blue Sky Prototype architects have met with representatives of Bao Steel and SBS Engineering Construction Company, and have visited the project site, neighboring SBS construction sites, and the SBS fabrication facilities in Wuhan where portions of the project will be prefabricated. As the primary engineering and construction collaborators with whom the next stages of the project will be developed, the Blue Sky Protoptype has been designed for practical application of the current research interests and production capabilities of SBS. The architects have pursued further housing and building code research with local architects and engineers and have developed the construction system, site and building design in coordination with both current codes and with some expansions of current code objectives based on local industry explanations of new national initiatives for housing innovation, land conservation, and affordability. Based on these national objectives, the Blue Sky Prototype challenges a number of current residential building norms and pushes certain code prescriptions based on the proposal of alternative approaches that will meet or exceed current safety, health and life quality code objectives; further meet new national objectives for affordability, increased density and land conservation; and further create a much higher level of life quality and long term sustainability. The design makes only minor deviations from fundamental building codes with clear offsetting rationale. For example, as a demonstration project innovation, the proposed 12 story building configuration achieves greater life-safety and circulation convenience than is provided in code-category maximum 11 story buildings; and achieves increased dwelling density, improved sunlight orientation, increased public and private open space and ventilation; and still reduces total land coverage and distance between buildings without shading adjacent dwellings. However, the design will function equally well with the removal of the twelfth story for this prototype if that is required. The primary quality of the Blue Sky proposal is not so much in the precise form and space of its configuration for this site, but instead in the broad adaptability that this system provides for efficient design modification for this and future projects without altering the fundamental building components or detail engineering which can be continuously developed and refined in parallel with larger scale planning and program changes.

The fundamental building block of this system is a modular moment frame box assembly that can be easily stacked at full building height without temporary bracing or scaffolding, before in-fill beams are placed and floor slabs are cast. This construction sequence allows for extremely rapid, precise erection, with immediate working floor space providing safety and efficiency at each step in the building process. Each of these modules is designed to be prefabricated offsite for optimum efficiency and quality assurance, and is sized to match the international standard high cube shipping container dimensions. This regularity is central to the concept of factory quality; seamless transportation options within standardized truck, rail and overseas shipping systems; and the inventory and job site advantages of just-in time manufacture, uniform production scheduling and the ability to serve distant as well as local markets in order to maintain production line efficiency and sustainable job stability for the factory workers. This basic module is designed to incorporate all of the more complex building systems that will be most effectively produced in a controlled factory environment. For example, the moment frame module contains all critical structural welds. In-fill beams spanning between the modular moment frame towers require only bolted connections with no field welding. There is substantially improved cost and schedule efficiency as well as increased quality assurance just within this innovative modular framing system, using only the existing SBS production facilities. This efficiency can be greatly expanded for this or for future buildings if the factory production is expanded to include additional prefabrication bundled into this core module. All plumbing, mechanical systems, electrical sub-panels and dwelling unit stairs are designed to occur within the basic moment frame modules. This affords the opportunity for factory fabricating most of the complex building tasks and minimizing on site work, resulting in very rapid construction at greatly reduced costs, and introducing a highly competitive, easily transportable construction product capitalizing on local excess capacity for steel production and fabrication.

The basic moment frame module is adaptable for a range of conditions within efficient production limits, but unlike most modular systems, this core component does not require standardization or system limitation on the larger bulk of the building infill, which can be developed with great design flexibility, since the most complex construction issues are efficiently contained in the base module. In addition to the base module that defines the bulk of the building volume for both residential and ground level commercial and public space, the Blue Sky Prototype system provides an additional kit of parts that delivers specialized green technology capabilities along with a distinctive and inspiring thread of spatial experiences within the public and community circulation and social spaces. This secondary kit of parts is based on spherical geometric volumes framed with rolled hollow tube steel structure in-filled with a calligraphic steel rod screen of varying densities created by overlapped windings of steel rod efficiently produced using standard cad-cam rebar bending and spot-welding machinery. This distinctive thread of lacy spatial definition serves multiple purposes as it weaves through the public spaces of the buildings. Its primary function is as a fine-grain modulator of light, wind velocity and privacy as a seemingly light and fluttering screen wall embedded across the deep ventilation corridors of the south façade. While the overall form of the building does most of the solar screening and wind channeling, the screen wall is an essential tool for optimizing the varied shading and wind screening needs that analytical software identifies at each point and elevation in the building. This varied porosity of the steel rod

All aspects of the project design are intended to facilitate a healthy, sustainable and joyful open-air life of “streets” and public gardens in the sky. The “streets” occur at every other floor in the building, providing great efficiency and facilitating social interaction. The building is highly porous and is designed to provide abundant air and light at all sides of each dwelling unit, and to make for pleasant travel and accommodation throughout the building. The residential tower is integrated with the surrounding site with strong spatial, environmental, and social connections that work to weave the building into the life of the surrounding community.

This high-density urban housing landscape is designed as an environmental sponge absorbing climatic impacts and slowly filtering the captured water and energy back into their natural and human eco-systems as useful nutrients. The site itself reaches out through the park to create an alluvial delta comb recapturing passing river sediment to slowly replenish and build the high ground and its natural waterfront life, much as the natural delta, bayous and barrier islands originally functioned. These sponge-like delta fingers then reach back and up to form the housing blocks themselves, which in turn also function as absorptive, living tissue in the larger landscape. For example, rainwater captured on the building roofs is trickled down through the organic siding system, watering the plants and filtering the excess, which is then stored in larger rain barrel tanks distributed throughout the block. Excess water storage capacity will then be available for a large area of the city in future emergencies, and storm sewers are not overloaded during more typical rain conditions.

The project will be fabricated almost entirely off-site using a hybrid, steel-frame/structural insulated panel system using no internal cavities and no water absorptive construction materials. The individual building units will be efficiently manufactured in three road-legal halves per typical two or three-bedroom flat and then stacked by crane as complete housing units on top of prefabricated, ground level retail and service cores built of water and termite resistant composite concrete panels. Earth excavated for building foundations is redistributed as water absorptive landscape berms creating a unified outdoor common space flowing upward from the river bank, through the public park and integrating into the geometry and eco-system of the individual house blocks. Earth cut and fill is balanced in order to minimize cost, energy expenditure and existing community disruption, while simultaneously enhancing the rich symbolism of a community rooted in the riverine ebb and flow of the local earth, water and weather cycles. Dwelling units share a common geometric order defined by the local urban street grid and housing typologies merging with the delta webbing of earth and water at the riverbank. Within the regular grid, the slightly sliding, rising and falling house positions create a readably syncopated rhythm, allowing the gardens and open space to shrink and swell across the roofs, creating variously sized and shaded outdoor gardening, dining and play areas. Market rate dwelling units will be largely pre-assembled with finished interiors, while below-market units will offer self-build options that incorporate homeowner and volunteer labor at both the factory and on-site construction stages. Self-build and volunteer labor construction process variations will accommodate differential cost structures, rather than overt distinctions in unit size, placement or quality. Within a highly democratic common building language, a wide range of residential, retail, community gathering and child-care spaces are included in the site planning and distribution of system modules, resulting in architectural, economic and social diversity intertwining across the well-integrated site. Community vegetable gardens, picnic and play areas weave as continuously linked walkways and platforms winding among the buildings above the parking level below, both defining internal community areas and flowing outward to the street edge as densely vegetated corridors of air and skylight, welcoming integration with the life and spatial massing of the larger neighborhood.

Primary design emphasis is placed on high-quality urban community life, applying a highly economical, energy-efficient, fair-wage manufacturing and construction process accompanied by sustainable land use patterns, siting optimized for solar and natural wind flow ventilation access and control; healthy, green-technology materials; and low energy-consumption mechanical and filtration systems. The building grain follows the typical street front building rhythm in the neighborhood and is organized to optimize day lighting, ventilation and outdoor access to all living units, offering air on all four sides of every unit as well as shade-protected outdoor living and play spaces. Primary building faces are composed of generous balconies or sunrooms intended to enliven all street and community garden facades with active, populated and densely planted outdoor living areas that also shade the public sidewalks and protects them from rain, as is a traditional New Orleans street pattern. The configuration of the housing blocks step down and adjust to the neighboring buildings, and step back at street level to activate street frontage with outdoor cafes, retail, bus stops, and pedestrian traffic. The site is conceived as a dense urban landscape block, porous to light and air at the residential levels, and carved out at the ground level to provide a dense parking area largely invisible to the surrounding streets and residents above, yet highly cost-effective as on-grade construction without expensive ramps and structure. The building itself is detailed as a simple, rational frame armature bringing the peopled life of shops, homes, trees, and hanging gardens into the forefront as a primary image of the site, with all building skins composed of louvered shutters made of growing tubes that absorb and slowly filter rainwater from the roofs back down to rain barrel storage containers while nurturing dense wall plantings along the way.

Underground and grade-level environmental systems will be placed as entirely pre-fabricated utility vaults with primary plumbing and mechanical systems already integrated at the factory. Ground level retail/restaurant, mechanical/utility and parking areas will be swung into place as water and rot resistant pre-fabricated steel/concrete composite panels similar to tilt-up construction. Parking is effectively offered, while car share, bicycle parking, and commercial storefront areas adjacent to city bus stops all encourage positive, car-free urban life. At the same time, primary street frontage accommodates urban parallel parking and storefront commercial space to accommodate existing community traffic logic and maximize friendly retail, residential and community center use at the street level.

Residential units will arrive as pre-assembled and pre-finished living units delivered as components similar to the arrival of two-piece, doublewide trailer units, and lifted into place by crane. The entire manufacturing and pre-fabrication process can be completed off-site within a 5-month, just-in-time delivery framework, overlapping with a total 3-month on-site construction period, minimizing costs, speeding housing delivery, and minimizing neighborhood disruption. The rationalized, componentized manufacturing, delivery and erection process provides tremendous cost-savings and reductions in urban disruption and site pollution. The building materials are high-recycled-content concrete, steel, and recycled wood—inert, healthy and free of off-gassing chemical products. Surfaces are hard and robust concrete, plantation hardwoods, and cement plaster on composite cement board—there are no absorptive, closed cavity insulation or drywall products. The building is organized and detailed to provide maximum daylight and airflow to each unit, and all primary community spaces, stairways and balconies are open air. All rooftops are designed for maximum photovoltaic energy production or for community and private garden spaces, and all roofs collect and filter rainwater for use as non-potable household water. Household gray-water will be filtered and recycled as garden irrigation. Black water and grade-level storm water will both be pre-filtered and partially treated prior to release into the respective city systems, in order to minimize the impact of increased density on existing city services. The intention of the site planning and building systems construction is to minimize adverse impacts on the delicate local urban and natural ecosystems, while offering latent absorptive capacity, internal self-sustainability, and reserve public emergency capacity for the surrounding community during extraordinary storm conditions. The exposed steel frames with prominent cross-bracing and active shutters functions both physically and symbolically as reassuring resistance against wind and weather. The construction of the building and its site reaches out through the park as an integrated delta barrier eco-system to absorb and accommodate the cyclical interactions of earth and water in extreme conditions, and is also intended as a prototypical approach to the functional and symbolic possibility of sustainable life at this water’s edge.

The Oakland Hills house was originally designed and built in 1954 by noted Berkeley architect Roger Lee who built a good many stout, disciplined and well-proportioned modernist homes in the Bay area during the 1950’s and 1960’s.  This house is built on a steep hillside site in the Oakland hills looking west across downtown Oakland, the Bay Bridge and out to the full panorama of San Francisco and the surrounding waters. During the preceding fifty years, the house became quite neglected and suffered a good deal of water and insect damage requiring a tearing back to the bare frame.  Our challenge was to restore, rebuild and transform the house within the design character, material palette, and logic of the original.

While much in the house is entirely new, it is all woven together with existing frames, mullions, jambs and siding wherever they could be saved and any over-restoration was carefully avoided so that important aspects of the patina of age was maintained. Nothing was made to intentionally mimic oldness, and many of the steel details and woodwork details are entirely new.  Everything new is constructed with the same workmanlike avoidance of superfluous craft or fussiness that was a compelling characteristic of the original.  The result is a house entirely transformed in its sense of space and light, in its integration of indoor and outdoor spaces, and in its accommodation of natural cooling and pleasant, light-filled living.  It would be very hard for anyone but the architect, owner and builder to discern what is old and what is new.  We hope that the original architect, the late Roger Lee, would consider it a logical and respectful collaboration with his original design; an appropriate collaboration between serious colleagues across a space of time.

The house is a fairly simple, T-shaped organization of interior spaces, arranged to form an entry court at the back of the house and a partially contained living deck on the view side of the house facing northwest, where the summer sun sets behind the Olympic mountain range.  The house is primarily one big slightly twisted continuous room, with defined functional areas oriented according to favorable relationships to the sun and views.

Surrounding trees accentuate the inward focus of the gently dished slope, so that the house appears to sit in a distinct trough, following the fall line of the hill. The roof of the house bends into a shallow “V” paralleling the cross-slope dish of the hillside. At the same time, the longitudinal axis of the roof folds downward to follow the hill, slumping into a comfortable resting position on the earth, not statically resisting its position, but flowing into the implied motion of the site.

The roof is the most important element of this house—a warm cedar cloud weighing in on the interior, defining a space between the sloping land and the heavy sky. This is a very characteristic Northwest experience: living on a hillside under a heavy sky, light poking in horizontally at sunrise and sunset, creating spectacular moments at the horizon, reflecting richly off the ceiling of clouds. Sometimes during the day a hole opens up and the light pours in from the middle of the sky. This roof works in the same way, with its central dormer angling toward the southeastern sky, bringing light over its shoulder, deep into the house.