Why can’t architecture be more like nature—changeable, varied, and uninhibited? Our client wanted to return home and feel a sense of private freedom, a release from the conformity of the world outside. In this project, we softened her existing Modernist house by infusing it with an atmosphere of clouds. The clouds scatter freely throughout the house, and dissolve and soften it in different ways. The clouds erode and blur the order of the rational modernist grid, creating a sense of space that floats and drifts.
Moments of softness are encountered unexpectedly—the interventions are like a mist that has settled unevenly. The softness dissolves the entry, melts the stairs, wafts through the house on all three floors, and a lonely cloud is trapped above a sheltered terrace.
The organic, amorphous forms were all computer designed and robotically fabricated. The specific materials include aluminum plate, high-density foam, concrete, MDO and plywood. Each of these scopes began with in-house discussions and soft pencil sketches of the effects we were after. To achieve these effects, we kept trying out different digital tools and fabrication techniques until we found a good fit. This project is more sculptural than algorithmic, so we tended to use digital tools which simulate traditional sculpting techniques rather than being data driven. We wanted to retain the possibility for intuition and contingency at every step of the design process