House for a Family in the 21st Century

Our final project for the semester was to create a house for a family living in the 21st century. In other words, we would design a house that is characterized by modern trends in architecture. We were given a site and then we were set off. The first thing I did was observe the site and noticed a significant curve in the landscape at the front of the property. I took advantage of that and produced a curved facade that would be the front of the building. That explains how I derived the curvature of my house.

One feature I wanted was the back of the house to look like a completely different structure than from the front, and vice versa. Someone would walk to the back of the house and think to themselves, "Wait, is this the same building, or am I missing something?" The slope of the terrain also assisted in this idea because I could create two levels. I made the upper level bigger and wanted the lower level to look like it was jutting out from the upper level, hence the same curve as the upper level. I decided to make the main entrance in the back just so people would walk through the beautiful landscape around the house and get to the "hidden entrance" in the back. Of course, I made sure to put doors in the front of the house as well to accomodate the lazy not wanting to walk all the way around the house to get inside. I still arranged trees and the sidewalk to direct people towards the back instead of the front.

The interaction with nature and architecture is a growing trend which causes many glass or window-filled facades to be created in modern architecture. People can be inside the house, sheltered from the elements, and still can feel the presence of nature around them. This is why I added so many windows in the back of the house. The view of the creek behing and the trees surrounding is critical to the pleasure of living in this house. For this reason I also created porches wrapping around the house to give people even more interaction with nature.

Another feature I added to this house is the interior connection of the two floors. In the stairwell, as you can see in one of the renderings, the ceiling is gone on the lower floor. It is just a big gaping whole where those on the upper floor can look into the lower floor. This increases interaction between the two floors.

The arrangement of rooms and hallways are unique as well. Each room is different and the hallways aren't arranged in a grid-like system like many others. This gives an abnormal feeling to the layout and enhances the overall attitude of the house. The family living here will not get bored.

Structurally, I placed foundation walls under the exterior walls of the upper story for support. I then added a sheet stone facade to the exterior of that. For the rest of the exterior walls, it is just concrete with a brown plaster facade.

As for the roof, I couldn't figure out what I could do with the curve that I had created. Then I thought to myself, "Why would I create a roof, which would cover up the beautiful curves that I have created with the walls?" Because of this thought, I decided to keep the roof flat and just raise the exterior walls up 1' above the roof to give a type of ledge and to help emphasize the curve even more if looked at from above. On the roof, I added gravel to give it character instead of it just being concrete.

Overall, I think it was a success. It took much longer than I had anticipated and I almost didn't finish on time! Luckily I did and was able to get 3 good renderings of my final product. Hopefully, with time, I will take even more rendered shots and post them here. Enjoy the renderings and comment and let me know what you think or any reccomendations!
By the way, the blue blob in the back of the first rendering is a van that didn't render! That will soon be fixed!

Final Blog of the Kitchen Renovation

Finally, I am able to blog again! I have been ridiculously busy the past month and now that school is finally winding down, I am able to start back up my site! I finished off talking about the kitchen renovation that I did. I used Revit Architecture 2010 to make a computer model and posted some photo-realistic renderings. I was not quite finished when I posted them. I ended up adding a wooded ceiling and added carpet. Not much is different except for the exception of the materials I added. Here are my final renderings. To me they turned out pretty well. As I mentioned before, this was my first time using Revit Architecture. I picked up on it faster than I had expected, so I expect to learn much more and be that much better at it in the near future! I can tell the difference already with our last project that we just finished up. I will talk about it in my next post, so stay alert!