Modern House by Omer Arbel Office.
This is a house for a family, built on a large rural acreage. There is a gentle slope from east to west and two masses of old growth forest defining two “outdoor rooms” each with a its own distinct ecology and conditions of light; the house is situated at the point of maximum tension in between these two environments, and as such acts at once to define the two as distinct, and also to offer a focused transition between them.
The design of the house itself began, as a point of departure, with a depository of one hundred year old Douglas Fir beams reclaimed from a series of demolished warehouses. The beams were of different lengths and cross sectional dimensions, and had astonishing proportions—some as long as 20 meters, some as deep as 90 cm. It was agreed that the beams were sacred artefacts in their current state and that we would not manipulate them or finish them in any way. Because the beams were of different lengths and sizes, we needed to commit to a geometry that would be able to accommodate the tremendous variety in dimension, while still allowing the possibility of narrating legible spaces. We settled on a triangular geometry.
Via dwell
