In designing this home, we asked ourselves whether we were capable of building something that really respected its natural surroundings and did not just pay politically correct lip service to issues like sustainability, alternative energy and ecology. Perhaps ultimately it was a question of making the most of the qualities of the given natural environment, maintaining the utmost respect for what nature offered, and impacting this as little as possible. We thought a good way to start might be to adapt the volumetric line of the building to the existing forest, leaving the trees to choose the way they should be experienced.
As the starting point for this process, we identified the clusters of trees that work together in the forest and then dared call everything outside that “anti-forest”, or a construction-susceptible void that required no removal of trees. We generated a flat geometry on top of this void avoiding the trunks, measuring heights from the existing ground level and the slope of the roof planes to comply with building regulations. This was an immensely complex part of the process. We had to do numerous tests before arriving at a solution that met all the parameters throughout the final volume. What appeared was a non-Cartesian geometry, a faceted volume that complied both with topographic conditions and planning requirements: an exciting brief in an exciting space. This geometry helped us define and discover ways of experimenting with built spaces and their relationship with the outside landscape. Accommodating both forest and building regulations proved a surprising and fruitful experience. The personal circumstances of the owner prevented conventional configuration and use of the home. We had to generate spaces whose programme could be adapted over time to the owner’s idiosyncrasies. So we set about defining the possibilities afforded by the resulting geometry, dividing space into what we called “specialised fingers”, each of which would house a...
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Interview with Thomas J. Pritzker
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