Inside a Modern Home With a Detachable Office on Wheels | Unique Spaces | Architectural Digest

[Music] I think kinetic elements are important we deal with Kinetic elements every day we open a door we open a window it's the place we actually touch the building there's an architect Yan plasma which has a terrific quote he says when you touch a building that's the handshake with the building it's the most intimate connection you have with the building so if you recognize that then you should make it a very special event rather than just a functional event I'm Tom kundig uh owner of Olson kundig Architects designer of the Maxon residence I built the house for the Maxon family just a terrific family Lou and Kim and their three boys the creative relationship between Lou and I was almost like colleagues Lou comes with a design background and so for us it was a conversation frankly about what he was thinking what I could bring to the table the architectural style at its root is modern modernism and what I mean by modernism is it's a rational building style it's more than style it's almost like a value is how do you make a building efficient and deliver it in a package that is also beautiful so form follows function Beauty follows function in my mind that's the definition of [Music] modernism originally the speculation of the idea that you could move a part of the house happened on a project maybe six or seven years ago where we were working on a project that had one particular family member that the rest of the family really didn't want to deal with and we were just laughing about it is wouldn't it be great if you could push a button and incent that bedroom off into the other end of the property but what I did was I brought it back to the office and our gizmology Phil Turner who's frankly a genius we talked about it and so he built a little model of a cog wasn't proven because it wasn't built but Phil with his background felt that absolutely it was it it was possible and so the conversation with Lou was this is efficient family house it's all about the chaos it's all about how do you raise a family well this particular house is relatively small house so it's really hard to get away from that kind of life but Lou wanted to remain on site he wanted to be with the family it was a conversation about maybe he could commute into the woods you know from this [Music] house I'm here with Lou Maxon at the entry to the Maxon property this is where the gate is and it sets the spirit of the house and it's intentionally very straight orthagonal and geometric as a Counterpoint to the beauty of the forest of course and the modeled light the speckled light that's coming through the forest as you come into the property you don't see the house at this point but as you come around the corner you begin to get a little glimpse of the house as it reveals itself in this landscape so this sort of chicane road which is called a a shifted axes it's very important in a Japanese garden where you can't see where you're going but as you come around the corner it reveals where you're going [Music] ultimately you'll notice the house kind of levitates or floats off the ground and the ground is allowed to go underneath the house so the idea is to float this building kind of J off the ground so that it takes that mid story between the upper forest and the low story so there's a ramp that is taking you from that sort of ground level to that elevated level at the entry door the exterior of the house is formed in a very simple shape to sort of almost be the end of the Yang of the natural landscape but it's also made out of a tough material that's allowed to weather ideally the building gets better with time rather than it's great at the beginning and then it begins to deteriorate it's also the colors fit in with some of the colors of the bark some of the colors of the landscape Beyond it's intended to sort of disappear into the landscape this is actually a good example of what we sometimes call an nominales and these are like in the wabisabi tradition an accident is a good thing because it gives sort of a Humanity next layer to the project and actually I just love the way that kind of like connects all the way through the entry door it's intentionally large into a relatively smaller more modest house for the big welcome into the family's home this is a good example of balanced light in the Pacific Northwest we have actually a large percentage of Cloudy Skies so you want to harvest as much light as possible but you also want to balance the light the glass is floor to ceiling so as much as possible it's opening to The View and to the light but also it's on the part of the building that's basically candle Eed above the ground so the idea is it feels like you float above the ground so there's a little bit of a different almost magical sort of moment when you come into this space you feel like you're hovering in that [Music] landscape the far end that we just came from is the living room and at this end the most private end is the bedroom and the bedroom then is confronting the rails and the office off in the distance that office can come all the way to this window and then Lou can walk into the private bedroom it's also you've got Balan light from three different angles blended into this room the reason for the wide train tracks has a lot to do with just stability because you got a relatively tall object here and you know you just want to be able to make sure I mean a train has the stability of a horizontal physics basically this is very vertical so you want to really be able to put that on solid rails in a sense so that it becomes functional the reason for the roughness is lose agenda where he didn't want to feel like he was on a MAG Lev train has a certain soul to it because of the grit and the way it functions and I think it makes perfect sense that you want to just be able to sort of tell the story about the materials and the relationship between the rails the wheels and then the building itself Lou was able to find these rails that were built pre1 1910 in Bethlehem bethle Bethlehem Steel this is perfectly level because obviously you can't have your car in any way sort of shift around you'll probably also see the sort of tall proportions the reasons for the windows being elongated is not just as a reference to the relatively long proportions of the building itself but it's also intentionally picking up all of the more vertical proportions of the forest here in the Pacific Northwest we talked about this yellow door maybe Instinct was on our part that it would be yellow but really for Lou this yellow is much more important from his research into what yellow means in the railroad industry warning signs Burlington Northern Graphics this has actually got an interesting history behind it yeah this this is an original Great Northern switch stand that they would use to switch the trains off the tracks so everything in the project that we found artifact wise had to be connected to Railways that would have served the community here or in the greater Pacific Northwest and we sort of brought back to life some of these artifacts this is the original lantern that would designate when the trains were coming this would have been full of kerosene but we've sort of hacked it to work with LED lights today the lights actually do come on on or will blink and so when I'm working the lights on someone knows I'm in here and not to be [Music] bothered once the possibility became a reality that we could actually collaborate and figure out how to have my studio run on actual railroad tracks that's really where I sort of looked back almost in a nostalgic way to like growing up and loving trains having a train set that really reinvigorated my passion for trains and it also sort of connected me to the history of carnation and the railroading here one of the key pieces of the project was figuring out how we're going to actually operate the rail car and through some connections I made with actual folks that work for the railroad they pointed me to this which is basically a locomotive control panel which runs even today on diesel and electric locomotive so we were able to actually acquire this and then have our fabrication team sort of hack it to work with our electric motor system so basically it all starts with this brass key and once the key is put into the locomotive control the key actually becomes the way that you motorize the studio so we're at the end of the track now but to point back towards the house the the Home Depot we go here and then the Studio starts moving we can actually change the speed of the the car if we want to go slow back home or if you're in a hurry to get home for dinner you just slide the locomotive control and we pick up [Music] speed the movement of that building changes the context becomes a sort of collected building but as soon as it moves there's a whole different sort of perception of that building and Lou can choreograph his experience he doesn't have to go to the very end he can stop along the way he can go back and it changes the perception of the [Music] building so here we're in lose World basically and as a creator ative this is what I just find personally fascinating is that all we do is we set up shelves or desks or whatever but this is the real interesting stuff all the little things that somehow Intrigue Loot and again all steel so you can use magnets to move things change things so this really is an active collage it's the most exciting part for me personally is how people actually engage their places it brings a Humanity to the building it brings a poetry to the building it tells you a lot about their personality way more than the architecture [Music] would in order to keep this as a tight disciplined box for all sorts of functional reasons we really didn't have the geometry or the space to do a stair so we basically did a ladder to go from the lower floor to the Upper Floor but you can't carry the stuff that Lou would need and so Lou thought well let's put a dumb weiter in here to carry some of the heavier stuff to the Upper [Music] Floor this is the studio upstairs It's relatively clean of stuff and of course you can also do chalk on this wall also so this is more about thinking and dreaming in I think this is something kind of interesting is L's got our model of the house with the office which moves on a little magnet was noticing that there's a Lego model up here that Lou or one of your kids possibly built so there's I think you know these proofing models are some of the most important design tools we can work with and this is elevating off the ground just for a little bit more of a peaceful quiet in the clouds kind of position off the the level where the chaos is with the family so super important view a quiet view a meditative [Music] view the architecture is intentionally or should be intentionally responding to the idios sycratic nature of the situation the client or the climate or whatever and as as you begin to understand those idiosyncratic situations you begin to use all the tools on your belt to basically come up with a route or come up with a solution and sometimes that leads into invention and of course that's a very exciting moment when that happens but you don't go into it I don't think looking for an invention or a new idea it's like a musician that's really skilled at a piece they'll always modify them because they're interested in it it's like Bob Dylan he's not going to play Tangled Up In Blue the same every time he does it he's always going to be sort of twisting it into sort of a different way that's a true creative and hopefully that's what Architects do yes you may have done it before we've certainly done roofs we've certainly done foundations and walls and if you're really skilled and you're really know those issues then you can actually it's like a jazz musician I would argue that most Jazz combos don't play the the same piece the same every time they play it because they're always in conversation biggest thing I took away from this house was friends and you always hope that's the case with these projects is that you remain friends and typically we do I think to be an architect is one of the biggest privileges we can have because literally you are involved in a community worldwide community and you are in a trusted position I to interpret what the community is thinking in a sense and giving something back to the community we're not in a life-saving situation but we're in a lifechanging situation and what a privilege to be trusted with that agenda [Music]

Channel: Architectural Digest

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Id: x9NcRZNaJAA

Length: 16min 2sec (962 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 02 2024