Inside an Ultra-Modern Home Inspired By Ancient Ruins (original) (raw)

[uplifting music]

[Omer] It just occurred to me that the forms

that these materials might suggest to us

might be much more exciting and radical than anything

we could come up with ourselves.

Any particular material will suggest a completely different

world of form if you really listen.

And to me that seemed worthwhile.

It seemed like something worth devoting a lifetime to.

[gentle music]

My name's Omer Arbel and I designed the 75.9 house.

This house is called, 75.9

Because it's the ninth iteration of the 75th idea

that we've authored in our studio.

We have a general philosophy in the studio,

which is that form should be born

of a material's intrinsic properties.

Glass, wood, and in this case, concrete.

And so when our clients approached us,

I said that that's what I wanted to do.

I wanted to explore the sculptural potential of concrete

in this kind of unpredictable way.

In other words, to set in motion

a way of making that we author without predicting

what it might look like when finished.

So I think it's kind of amazing that they went for it

because it's such a huge amount of risk.

[gentle music]

We've always had a critique

of contemporary concrete construction,

which is that it's a fluid dynamic material,

but those attributes of the material

are never acknowledged in the finished forms

that you see people making out of concrete.

And we've been doing that

at the scale of an object for many years.

To bring that philosophy into the scale of architecture

has been quite a challenge,

but also just an amazing opportunity.

It's almost like living with a very eccentric roommate

or something like that.

Like, to try to make something that's not necessarily

comfortable coexist within a comfortable home environment

for a family.

I thought that could make an exciting

premise for architecture.

[gentle music]

In Vancouver it rains eight months of the year.

It's really rainy, so we thought the experience

of entry could be really wonderful if it was very lush.

So the idea of the, what we're calling the, Winter garden

Is that it's very, very overgrown.

You see it here in its infancy.

That's sort of one idea about it.

And the other one is that these things are not

that far from being lily pads themselves.

Above us is the first lily pad,

and what you're looking at here is the dining room.

So what you'll notice is that we've changed height.

Space sort of explodes as soon as you enter,

and then it intentionally gets low over the dining table.

So that feeling of expanding

and then contracting gives you an intimate feeling

of the space, but also totally focused on the field.

You're seated, you have this like, very heavy thing

above you, but your experience is thrown out

into the sunset.

[gentle music]

We thought of forming it using fabrics.

I'm not the first explore this,

but this is probably the first time the technique

of fabric forming was explored at scale.

It's almost like a reverse tent structure

if you think of it.

There are stiff parts like the tent poles

if to use that analogy.

And then there's the soft parts, which are the fabric.

And our role was to sculpt the form such that it could

on the one hand attain all these technical requirements

that we had to respond to, but also to keep the process

open-ended enough to surprise us so that the form

really responded to what the material wanted to do,

not necessarily what we wanted it to do.

One of the innovations of the method that we developed,

and this came from our structural engineers,

was to concoct the recipe for the concrete

such that its rate of curing followed the rate

of pouring the concrete very closely.

But these took like, 12 hours to pour

or something like that on the one hand,

and then have the speed of curing closely matched that rate

of pouring such that the pieces attain structural integrity

as the pour is happening.

And also it allowed us to really trust the fabric form work

because you can imagine that a lot

of the hydrostatic tension no longer had to all fall

on the one part of the stem that's closest to the ground,

but it was rather distributed over the entire length

of the piece.

[gentle music]

One of the things I love and didn't really anticipate

was the juxtaposition of, on the one hand,

the weight of the concrete,

something feeling so massive, especially above us.

And on the other hand, something kind of pillowy and soft.

[gentle music]

I like to play with this idea of compression and expansion.

So we have just been compressed in the dining room

and then we make our way to the living room

and the space expands above us.

Again, sort of like in the direction

of the westerly-facing field.

And so the sunset's very strong in this room,

and you have a contrast between the height on the one hand

and the horizontality of the sight on the other.

[gentle music]

Given that these concrete pieces are so brutal

and possibly uncomfortable,

I felt that the contrast needed to be warmth.

And that's why we really wanted oak.

And I think that without the wood, it might make

for an amazing cultural space or something like that,

but as a home, it needed something

to anchor it back into an experience

that humans identify as comfortable.

[birds chirping]

[ethereal music]

The sunsets over the fields are just sublime experiences.

And so to orient most of the spaces such that they capture

that magical west light

and such that the windows could really sort of almost

as if you were in a ship

and you were sort of seeing the rise over the ocean,

felt like the most poetic response

to this site that I could come up with.

And then east light, we treat it as a mysterious thing.

It appears almost in all the spaces,

but in a mysterious way, not directly.

It's filtered.

It comes in ambient, so that again is a contrast.

[ethereal music]

I am the creative director of a company called Bocce,

and we make predominantly lighting.

I made these sort of clouds, cloud forms.

This particular piece is called, 100

And it was new when this house was starting to come

to the later stages of the construction project

and our clients fell in love with them.

So my role was simply to compose how they might interact

with the spaces.

And in general, I like seeing lighting as a way

to experience volumes

that you can't really occupy with your body.

[ethereal music]

Here we can see a another intention which I had

in the scenario of a gathering or a party,

there would be people down here in the living room,

but also up there in the outdoor dining room.

So there is that idea of a second topography

and you're always passing sort of under

or over the concrete lily pads.

[ethereal music]

So we began by making small castings this big

and then larger and larger trying to prove the method,

but what we learned very quickly

is it doesn't really scale up.

And so really the only way to do it is to try it at scale.

And that was a kind of amazing thing

to discover is you can't really prepare.

And one of the ways that we navigated that,

let's call it trepidation, was to say,

Okay, let's just make one lily pad, a small one,

and see how it goes.

And so we made a small one, a five meter tall one,

and it was successful.

Everybody sort of believed in the idea after that.

[ethereal music]

Our builder was fearless.

And can you imagine just pouring all that concrete

into basically a tent structure

and just hoping for the best.

It's like, it's wild.

That's courage.

[wind chimes chiming]

[ethereal music]

This is the primary bedroom that opens out to the west,

to the field.

Right beyond here is the first concrete piece we made.

It has a lot more awkward quality to it and it's heavier

and it's more stretched out in it's proportions,

and it's beautiful because it's what proved

that the method works.

Now it's just part of the house.

I wanted a more intimately scaled concrete piece

in the place where you experience water.

The quality of water and the liquid nature

of these concrete works seemed compatible.

[ethereal music]

We are in a outdoor zone right next to the primary bedroom,

and 'cause this is very private.

It doesn't seem private, but it really is

'cause you're surrounded by a field.

The main shower is an outdoor shower,

and the idea here was we just like tugged on the fabric

a little bit to make that spout

and so the water falls from that little protrusion above.

To bring in light into the buried portions of the house,

we needed to sort of carve out these curved shapes.

And so because it's a retaining wall, it made sense

to build it out of concrete

and because we had developed this method,

we thought to apply it to the surface of a wall.

The pillow surface is a direct consequence

of the hydrostatic pressure of the concrete.

So wherever you have one of these, you had plywood rib,

and then fabric is draped here.

And as the concrete fills up, it pushes out

and makes these sort of swells pillow like forms.

[ethereal music]

A device that I used compositionally throughout the work

was this idea that the concrete works were found objects,

and they're not found, we made them,

but it was a useful mental device to compose with.

As if it were ruins of a 5,000 year old structure

that were discovered here,

and then our role was to sort of encase them

or exhibit them with the tools of contemporary architecture

at our disposal.

This idea of modernist forms or containers for the lily pads

to inhabit, again made sense to make them feel warm.

We clad them in wood, but that also should suggest

or hint at what's happening inside.

We, in a very compositional, deliberate way,

carved out window openings into those volumes.

Through those you see the concrete forms

in the sort of cropped way, the same way you might crop

a work of art or a photograph.

[ethereal music]

The horizon is aggressive and relentless,

and the sunset makes it even more sublime, but intense.

And we felt like topography would modulate that experience

and make it kind of rich, but not too aggressive.

We draped the field over the house, which meant

that there are these hills that berm over certain rooms.

In this particular case, it's the corridor over there

is the primary bedroom.

And bringing light into those rooms required us

to come up with some sort of method or device.

And we did it by carving out these essentially light wells

that could also be inhabited.

So each one is a little courtyard

introducing an outdoor space that has intimacy

and dimension in an otherwise vast and relentless horizon.

[ethereal music]

The concrete lily pads are hollow

because they are effectively planters

for gigantic mature trees on the roof,

or what will become gigantic trees.

And so all that drainage from these enormous planters

has to pass through these stems,

and that means that they have to be hollow.

[birds chirping]

[ethereal music]

It's a surreal moment, to have trees floating

doesn't register that as logical in our minds.

It's a dream scape.

I like inviting these moments of surrealism

into the project, which you maybe don't even realize

you're experiencing, but they give the experience

of inhabitation a dreamlike quality.

[ethereal music]

We have climbed up the stairs

and now we're looking at the downstairs.

So the two large pieces on both sides

of the dining room are bathed in south light.

You can see that there's a skylight surrounding three

of the four faces,

and the intent there is to make them feel like

they're kind of floating and surrounded with a halo of sky.

We are on top of the dining room lily pads.

So this is the outdoor dining room.

Imagine in your mind's eye this tree 30 years from now,

much bigger and fuller.

So here we see the intention of having

this sort of secondary landscape.

This is cedar, which is a material that's associated

with this region, and it has the nice quality

of silvering over time,

which we thought was very beautiful when considered against

the texture of the gray concrete

and the gray clouds of Vancouver.

[ethereal music]

We live in a world of one size fits all solutions.

We wear the same clothes and listen to the same music

and eat the same food, and it's like, what if we developed

forms that can't be repeated?

These forms, if we were to repeat exactly the same process,

would yield different results in another site.

I find that interesting. I think that's meaningful.

[ethereal music]