ALL-INCLUSIVE CLIFF HOUSE
Palo Duro Canyon State Park
Canyon, USA
04 | 2017
Background
Moving to the countryside from an urban area typically entails a significant change of pace in daily encounters. While living a simpler life has proven to offer health benefits, the process of moving to a rural area and adapting to a new setting can be quite overwhelming. With this in mind, our client desired to custom-build a self-sufficient home that could accommodate for all of their current and future needs. As a result the following off-grid house was created to overcome the shortcomings of isolated living. Emilio Ambasz's green wall, Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum, and Richard Serra's sculptures all emphasized on scale and played a key role in influencing the cliff house's concept design.
Preliminary
Breaking down the critical objectives and distinguishing elements of cliff house was key to ensuring a viable design. These inputs included the expansive view, minimal energy use, and efficient distribution of space. All of these inputs aimed to address issues such as resource scarcity and social isolation associated with off-grid living. Outputs of this analysis resulted in the application of unique spaces focused on delivering experiences in addition to innovative solutions aiming to optimize quality of life.
Mid-Stage
Several individual bubble maps were created to convey the distribution of space inside the cliff house in a simplified manner. After selecting the best bubble map based on the criteria lister earlier, workload shifted to the development of informative paper drawings and detailed layout modeling in Autodesk Revit.
Final
The All-Inclusive Cliff House is a geographically isolated home that incorporates all aspects of independent, off-the-grid living including adequate social, work, and leisure space.
