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  BIM model view

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  2nd level plan

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  View from north-west

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  View from south-west

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  Panelized wall construction

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  Construction process photo

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  Construction process photo

In progress

Berkeley CA

Text coming soon

This portable classroom is designed to provide an optimized educational environment for students and teachers while advancing sustainable design principles. The classroom maximally conserves as well as collects and generates natural resources, including electrical energy, daylight, wind energy, and rainwater. As well as being strong, efficient and conserving, natural forces and resources are highlighted and exposed throughout the structure, and all systems and performance criteria are monitored and broadcast to the web. The building acts as a learning tool for occupants, other schools and the general public. The combination of maximized photo-voltaic surface and efficiency matched with low energy consumption creates a positive net energy production that is four times the building’s annual consumption.

Design Overview:
The design optimizes photovoltaic roof surface orientation, naturally shaded north-facing daylight glazing, and modulated natural ventilation. All of these forces are balanced with the additional criteria of manufacturing and transport efficiency, functionality for classroom use, low operating costs and ease of maintenance. The manufacturing and delivery process, and the materials and products employed are all selected for minimum environmental impact and for maximum contribution to a healthy indoor environment. Wherever possible, materials are chosen to conserve resources, minimize initial and lifecycle maintenance costs, and to promote educational awareness of the natural environment and its relationship to comfortable and healthy living.

The design focuses on performance issues directly impacting the learning experience of its occupants and the environmental quality of its community—thermal comfort, natural daylighting, indoor air quality, energy and resource conservation and generation.

Materials and Performance:
The building is prefabricated in three easily transportable modules, reducing initial cost and energy, and facilitating efficient relocation and reuse in the future, minimizing waste. A steel frame and steel and rigid foam sandwich panel floor and roof system minimize material use; maximize insulation and heat reflection; and deter pests and mold in the cavity-free structure. A simple, double wall metal cladding, along with metal roofing shaded by solar panels above a 3” ventilated airspace, creates a ventilated double skin greatly reducing heat gain. All glazing is operable and north facing and/or shaded to prevent direct sunlight, and to optimize natural ventilation and comfortable airflow. Interior surfaces are low VOC products. Exposed beams are FSC certified glue-laminated timbers combined with steel trusses to trace primary structural forces. Interior surfaces are naturally finished, low VOC materials to provide good interior air quality.

Daylighting analysis indicates that excellent work light levels are achieved throughout the typical school day in most locations without electric lighting. Thermal comfort analysis indicates the classroom will be comfortable in most high heat climates without air conditioning, although an efficient mechanical air conditioning system is also available as an option for school sites where air quality, or noise conditions preclude natural ventilation.

In-progress

Sebastopol CA

Text coming soon

To accomplish this goal, the building components are based as closely as possible to the conventional sizes, configurations and fabrication systems typical to the modular industry. Within this rigid typology, construction systems were closely studied and streamlined at every opportunity. Standard materials and equipment were replaced with healthier, more sustainable and less energy intensive alternatives wherever this could be achieved within reasonable cost constraints and with minimal disruption to factory work line procedures. The resulting new standard module maintains the existing proportions and system logic dictated by transportation law and factory constraints, but revolutionizes quality in terms of ceiling height, acoustics, indoor thermal comfort, indoor air quality, natural light and ventilation, low carbon footprint, healthy materials and sustainable materials, equipment and energy use.

This portable event pavilion is designed as a self-contained, off-grid modular structure with planted roof sections showcasing an innovative green roof technology allowing native Texas prairie grasses, yucca, prickly pear cactus and several hundred additional species to survive in Southwest climates without irrigation. The pavilion is scheduled to travel to a series of PGA tournaments and NASCAR racing events, providing shade, two-story viewing platforms, refrigerated refreshments and environmental education. Jointly sponsored by a university environmental studies program; a dry land native living roof start-up firm; an international wind energy company; a modular building manufacturer; and the PGA and NASCAR organizations, the pavilion is intended to be fun, functional and educational for diverse public communities not ordinarily exposed to advanced green technology and environmental education.

The pavilion is constructed of re-used components and high-recycled content steel; with recycled content plastic shade cloth screens and planter boxes containing native plants.  Protected within a limestone-composite thermal mass, native plants are able to survive harsh sun and drought conditions. While living roofs have become increasingly affordable and feasible in wetter, more northerly climates, this new planting design and composite product allows living roofs to become practical in hooter drier climates such as west Texas and the American Southwest without depleting water resources. Even more so than in northern climates, affordable and practical living roofs in hot, dry climates offer tremendous potential for energy savings while simultaneously supporting native plant species otherwise threatened by development. The wide reaching shade screens are operable to provide optimized shading in a wide range of site conditions, and fold flat into a compact box of standard ISO shipping container size for efficient transport. Power is provided by wind turbines and solar PV panels shipped within the box frame. As a modular system, multiple frame modules can be combined to create much larger exhibition structures in a range of configurations. The basic frame module is 8’ x 40’ X 9’-6” providing two stories of 320 s. ft. floor space, and unfolded the pavilion shades an area of 1508 square feet. The structure cost approximately $5000 in cash beyond donated design, materials and fabrication labor, and was fabricated and constructed in a tight three-week schedule.

Fort Worth Texas, and traveling
Anderson Anderson Architecture, San Francisco, with Cameron Schoepp, Fort Worth
Design Team: Peter Anderson, Mark Anderson, Cameron Schoepp, Karl Vavrek, Yevgeniy Ossipov, Jon Kinder, Dave Williams, Chris Powell, Johnson Tang, Chris Campbell, Brent Sumida

The business of architecture often attempts to justify its role in the economy by describing itself as a profession of efficient problem solvers. Although few clients believe this and actually bet their money on it, the concept still warps the profession in many ways. This is a complicated issue related to many questions of how to work as an architect in positive and meaningful ways. Designing our lives and working methods as creative architects is a much more complicated project than meets the eye. The real and perceived business role of the architect working within the construction economy is a background issue that haunts all architecture projects. We will not solve any of those questions in this seminar, but we will fight back against our powerlessness: we will build the biggest possible construction without spending a nickel, asking nobody for permission. According to popular economic theory, this will not do one good thing to help the economy—but we’re not buying that either.

EPRF
I have a plan. But since we are asking nobody’s permission, it also follows that you should feel free to deviate from my plan, or to throw it out altogether in favor of some more radical plan of your own making that is even more powerful and theatrical than every possibility that I am imagining. In either case our plan must be bold, spec¬tacular and effective. I would also like to stipulate that—fairly or unfairly—nobody gets hurt.

This is what I am thinking: EnormousPlasticRainFlower. We shall build an enormous plastic rain flower that will capture and purify drinking water from the sky. It will look ridiculous of course, and significantly so. Beautiful and grotesque, our flower will further serve as a wide-spreading public umbrella tree drawing people to gather under its shelter, protected from the sky’s harshness even while succored by its fruit. Like a flower blossoming from cow dung, this machine-flower of human sustenance will blos¬som from the fertile waste of excessive human consumption. Our flower will be constructed purely of plastic water bottles, sugared beverage containers, and other scrap plastic constructions, stitched together with screw-top cap bolts and structurally layered as translucent, crystalline pistils and petals funneling sunlight and rain drops into corded plastic stems of tuberous filtration drawing downward into threaded, clinging roots spitting small fountains of sweet rainwater sucked freely by passersby delighted by the novelty of drinking water cut free from intercontinental transport, commerce and cash. That’s it, simple and pure—one material, multi-purpose, full with questions and possibilities. How tall can this reach and how far can it spread? What will it look like and where might it grow? Did I mention that this is a seriously purposeful study in structure, construction and materials—EPRFTM, and all of that?

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

A media-intensive, 16,000 square foot exhibition space for digital design and fabrication, this project was delivered under a fast track, design-build, Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) contract. The design and construction process took place entirely using collaborative Building Information Modeling (BIM). The project consists of exhibition galleries, artist-in-residence digital design studios, conference and education spaces, with advanced multimedia audio-visual, information technology, and digital fabrication systems integrated into the spatial design of the architecture.

The design process and design concept work together to emphasize four integrated points reinforcing the owner’s intended message: Parametric modeling in support of integrated practice, sustainability and design innovation. With these goals in mind—and the intention to draw upon the unique site and to distinguish a multi-industry software maker’s creative project from more static exhibitions of physical products—the architects introduced the intention to design a space of “creative immersion in an ever-refreshing, media-saturated, special-for-me experience blossom floating within San Francisco clouds.”

To accomplish these goals, the physical space consists of a very simple, rectilinear background structure of translucent fabric boxes suspended above a polished concrete floor. The palette of materials is limited to white drywall and steel, polished concrete, and translucent white fabric hung within the exposed brick and concrete frame of the existing historic building, the large round-topped windows of which open out onto the fog-shrouded downtown waterfront. The primary spatial experience of the project is not the physical structure, but is instead the image content projected onto the system of taut white fabric boxes flowing fog-like throughout the space, defining individual galleries and meeting spaces, yet tying the space together as a single experiential thread of immersion within floating film imagery. Utilizing a complex grid of 84 projectors and hundreds of focused speakers, a coordinated film can wander through the entire space of the project—perhaps tracking a swarm of butterflies floating above a field of time-lapse blossoming flowers, or tracing the flow of blood through an animated digital heart.

The projection screen boxes are themselves the lowest-hanging components of a field of similar fabric boxes suspended from the ceiling. Together this single background field of cloud-like, undulating rectilinear space serves as projection screens, space dividers, acoustical dampeners, and support enclosure for the dense array of projectors, speakers, computer boxes, mechanical equipment and lighting systems that would otherwise form the predominant and overwhelming image of the space. Within this undulating white cloud, the spatial experience focuses on the software exhibition of human creativity and technological results, rather than on the hardware experience of technological support. Local reclaimed Redwood millwork, Sierra granite, and black recycled steel complete the physical exhibition and furnishing support closest to the body.

As part of a larger, integrated office, conference and gallery complex of 35,000 square feet, the overall project was managed under an equal IPD partnership of two architecture firms (Anderson Anderson Architecture and HOK, designer of the adjacent office spaces); builder (DPR Construction); and owner (Autodesk). This new IPD contract method aligns the interests of all parties and equally incentivizes cost-savings, project speed, quality and design innovation. Together, the project team has delivered a LEED Platinum sustainable project, the highest rating for green construction. The project was delivered in an extremely tight design and construction timeframe, meeting target budget and time schedules, with substantial additional program added into the project during the course of construction, thanks to under-budget savings and the nimble and collaborative contract structure. With its design partner, McCall Design Group, Anderson Anderson Architecture subcontracted and managed a diverse team of engineers, consultants, and technology design collaborators. The project achieved a top, 100% quality and innovation rating in the IPD contract incentive evaluation provided by an independent peer review.

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.

New Orleans, Louisiana

International Competition, First Prize

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.

The site 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. Rainwater captured on the building roofs is trickled down through the organic siding system, watering the plants and filtering the excess water, 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 will not be overloaded during more typical rain conditions.

The project will be fabricated almost entirely off-site using a hybrid, steel-frame/structural insulated panel system. 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 local housing typologies merging with the delta webbing of earth and water at the riverbank. Within the regular grid, 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 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 and light 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 shops, 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 for shade, privacy and healthy air.

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 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 function both physically and symbolically as reassuring resistance against wind and weather. The construction of the building and its landscape reaching out through the Alluvial Sponge Garden park as an integrated delta barrier eco-system absorbing and accommodating the cyclical interactions of earth and water in extreme conditions, is intended as a prototypical approach to the functional and symbolic possibility of sustainable life at this water’s edge.

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.

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.

The 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.

Hot White Orange is a solar heated, portable amphitheater sized to comfortably accommodate thirty people in conditioned comfort during outdoor events and performances. The project was commissioned by UC Berkeley using privately donated funds and services, and was a collaboration of professional architects, Bay Area industrial fabricators, and 22 architecture students. The design team was divided into a number of separate sub-teams responsible for design and production of specific components of the project. To maintain integration and coordination, the form and general approach was established in one group meeting at the beginning of the project. To minimize gross-scale design negotiation, the formal structure was established as precisely that of the orange fruit. With this parameter, a simple 3-dimensional digital model was created as the common base geometry for the project, within which all further design and fabrication issues would be negotiated. The size of the object was established as a 10’ diameter sphere. The portable outdoor amphitheater program generated functional criteria for weatherability, mobility, and outdoor seating comfort. The project has a steel frame exoskeleton, air-filled bladder internal structure, hydronic heating coils circulating hot water supplied by pump from a satellite solar heating bladder. The heating coils are wrapped around water-filled thermal ballast blankets beneath the external vinyl skin, which is lit from within. The orange fruit serves as both formal geometry paradigm as well as inspiration for the complex interior structure and mechanical systems of a living, pulsing, vascular bladder architecture. The project generated tremendous new insights into rich alternative worlds of cad-cam fabrication technology available in structural and material industrial processes not usually engaged in typical building construction.

Notable Points:

An experiment in pro bono service to a public institution, integrating the services of architects and Bay Area manufacturers and fabricators who both donated services and included student volunteers as an educational process allowing real-world, full-scale design and building experience in a manufacturing environment.

An experiment in cad/cam fabrication technologies not typical in everyday building construction, with the parallel intention of making solar technology interesting to designers

Statement of Criteria and Design Solution:
Budget $15,000 in private donations, plus donated services

Project Information:

Wurster Hall
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Size:        24’ diameter, 10’ height(closed), 452 square feet
Cost:        $13,000 total

Project Team:

Mark Anderson, AIA
Peter Anderson, AIA
Yuki Bowman
Grant Chang
Neil Dau
Bill Glauch
Emily Behoar Gosack
Christine Chang
Lamia Bensouda
Myrto Milliou
Chris May
Margaret Sledge
Joe Jacoby
Amy Van Nostrand
Kevin Markarian
Claudio Martonffy
Danny Lee
Cari Rosner
Nash Hurley
Ed Rendle
Natalie Kittner
Tzu-Tsen Kuo
Reiko Matsuo
Goran Wang
Toben Wyndahl
Byron Chang
New World Manufacturing

Architect:  Mark Anderson, FAIA  Peter Anderson, FAIA

Owners:      University Of California, Berkeley

Engineering consultant:      Terry Nettles, P.E.

General Contractor:    University of California, Berkeley

Photographer:    Anthony Vizzari

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.