Villalucy, Port Townsend WA, 2004
Published:
Detail in Contemporary Residential Architecture, 2007
Glass Houses, 2006
The New Wood House, 2005
Architectural Record, July 2005
Dwell Magazine, April 2005
The cliffs of sand and knotted tree limbs face west toward the Straight of Juan de Fuca and what seems like the horizon beyond. Except for what has rolled in on the water, the beach at their feet is deserted; for most, the uneven crumbling footing on the way down is more than enough reason to turn back.
But on top, at the cliff's edge, the world is different. Here a tidy twisting gravel road provides easy access to a neatly strung set of lots. Almost as neatly each of these parcels has been domesticated for weekend living. Heavy houses straddle the land. With the trees between them and the water view razed, lawns have been cultivated and studded with mums. Familiar comforts and a picture-perfect prospect have been chosen hands down over the real face of this place.
To this spot and to an undeveloped uncleared lot at the end of the road, the owners brought a different attitude. Drawn by the land itself - its old valiant trees, the soft stratified piles of dead ones, the eagles, the light and passages of sky - the city dwellers were eager to frame a conversation with the place "as is".
The house wpa designed is an antidote to the introverted routines of city living. The house is perched rather than planted. Like an anchored branch, it floats above the soft fragile ground below. Here what's happening outside is given first billing. The life of the house is a reaction to it.
You enter the house through a bar - an attenuated service zone dense with the practicalities of bathrooms, kitchen, storage and utility supply. Beyond the bar, the real living rooms are entirely open to the view and interpretation. This space is purposely abstract - stripped of air registers or built-in furniture, any tagging suggesting how it might or should be used. The house is a lookout, a delicately detailed observation platform from which to view what's beyond rather than a set piece in a highly articulated domestic drama. Here you are exposed, even susceptible, to the moods and rhythms of the land you see and the light you see it in. And because the house is not tied to any set script, you are free to respond.
wpa deferred to the land throughout the planning of the house. The identical steel moment frames that make up the structure of the building were fabricated offsite. This pre-fabrication minimized the staging area needed to build the house. Since the erection of the frames could be choreographed precisely, the balance of the construction could take place in the air - on a platform supported by these frames hovering en pointe above the existing topography. Over the course of the construction, phases of the work were scheduled with the help of a wildlife biologist to protect an eagle's nest with newborn chicks 60 feet off the house. The young ones have flown. But the parents live there still.
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