Transformer CNC cabin by a lake becomes father-son work dialogue

when we started with trying to find a place to build a small house in the United States the problem you have is zoning zoning is very difficult to find we studied from Lake Michigan all the way across from Ontonagon to the Brule River and one of the things out here because this is Sol woods like type of area we really found that there was almost no zoning we found that Bay field had probably the best land and the best opportunities for getting away and still had zoning that allowed for what we wanted to do anything under two hundred square feet you could build without a building permit anything so then if you were over 200 square feet and you slept in it then you just had to get a zoning permit and there was no restriction on how small you had to be basically the center cube of this building is 12 foot wide 12 foot long between the balconies and 12 foot high in doing that we were kind of trying to be like on a four foot module as we built this and that the kitchen is like eight feet the bathroom and the storage is eight feet and each of the lofts which are above are like eight feet deep but twelve feet wide we were trying to make it as compact as possible so it was more of an exercise in reducing to what we thought was a good minimum at the top of the paddle stairs we put a landing that's six feet tall so that you can stand up right here before you go into the bed area so where the bed is it's only about four and a half feet tall but then it's six feet right here so the six feet allows for a six foot ceiling in the space below so below me right now is actually the toilet and then the stairs themselves they're kind of a cross between a ship's ladder a ladder and a stair by creating this paddle geometry it makes it easier to go up and down but takes up less space we use Baltic birch plywood which is some of the plywood has 11 and 13 plies and the one-inch thick like this plywood gear you can see the furniture connectors here that allow us to take it apart and put it together this element is not only the railing but it's actually the beam that holds the loft up it's structural yeah it's very structural and that's the other thing is that in a building this small we said that we didn't really want to have framed walls behind this cabinet is the only framed wall where it holds the plumbing to go up through the attic an example of the panel would be from here to that corner and then up to the ceiling this this would be one of the actual structural panels so this can move money it's theoretically demountable although this time it was built in a more permanent fashion with a full foundation but it was built with a temporary foundation before we built this building in rough framing in our parking lot at the office everything was screwed together with Torx screws which are the big structural screws and therefore we knew that we were trying to get it to be moved to another location so we built about 60% of it in our parking lot and then in a like about a four day build we took it to the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair stuck in an alfalfa field screwed it all together again and we had approximately like 17,000 people go through it in a three-day weekend then it ended up this it's a doll some are in the field and they called me up and they said you really have to move this building off of our alfalfa field and so then we started looking for places kind of was in our heart thinking that this was the place because the zoning was right and we liked all of the water the woods everything else that was here really made us feel like this could give you the feeling that we were after of out there minimalist and we actually used the word monastic a lot of times because it's just so peaceful and so close to nature we basically built this kind of on a Swiss standard Austrian standard of a rain screen it's a ventilated wood structure we have a paper retardant paper behind here that allows the wood to dry out and breathe this is made of white oak white oak is supposed to be like a wood that can last a hundred years outside we have some pretty good-sized doors that close it off my wife was always afraid that bears or deer would run through the doors when we left and one of the neat things too about a ventilated sighting is that when the heat gets into the siding it ventilates out just like it's it's a grill for convection and it allows for the heat to travel up and in and works its way out and we found that the building was about four to six degrees warmer with the doors closures the doors actually have insulation in them also we have 3/4 inch plywood on each side there's an inch and a half of foam in the middle of it we have these aluminum seat channels which we're designed to just make the door stay straight then we have white pine angled wood on top of it that's screwed on to it treated lumber and then we apply these like panels onto the wall and you can see the screws in here and basically that's just a farm door trolley type of track the rollers come from a regular box store that has farm supplies for barn doors the roof is what we call a fly just like on a fly on the tent it's white facing up it reflects 320 BTUs of heat per square foot and so therefore none of that heat hits the building roof it's like having an umbrella over the building keeps it cool in there so the other thing that the fly roof does is it collects rainwater there's two cisterns for rainwater collection above this the mechanical room being that there's really one open space here we wanted to create as much flexibility for how this space is used we did a number of iterations of designing a piece of furniture that could function as a bed as a table and bench as a couch and this was what we ended up with there's just little screw knobs down in there we have piano hinges and then if you reverse where you put the screw in it holds the black legs up so that the table lowers down on it to make different configurations we very seldom would use it like this but basically could be designed as a coffee table that if you were having tea and crumpets here you can have a lower table and not have it feel like it's in the way of anything so this furniture was designed so that if you had any handicapped people like my mother or elderly they would be able to sleep here and not feel like they weren't part of the place yeah I can lay down real easy right now Oh feels good on my back you'd have a mattress right on top of it we have you actually brought down the the futon mattresses and laid them on here for people if we didn't have many people here in need the balconies but at the same token most times we will end up with an air mattress on top of here for the next person and it works fine use once in a while taking lots of room instead of - Oh obviously we don't have lots of room we'll take power poles and things that adapts to this situation right yeah so these chairs here were actually somewhat of prototypes when we were thinking of different ways of designing the the bench element of this furniture these were originally designed to the benches that could could sit like this for then or then be become chairs like that when you sit in it you look like you're missing part of the chair and when you sit down you find out that it doesn't matter I think the concept of being minimal means to use as little stuff as possible like the tube that's in the center here is basically part of a structural member to keep the ends from flopping but it also becomes the game storage and then you'll notice too that we store our place mats underneath the benches just like the table becomes different things we analyze sleeping when you sleep you don't sleep standing up unless you're a horse and in our case we are not horses so this height of 12 feet once we decided on that we had to work with it so that you know this height is is like more like 7 feet and then there's a very thin framework in here and so when you're laying down upstairs you have no problem with four and a half foot height up there and I think with the railing height you have some privacy without feeling like you're enclosed in a small box there's still maybe a foot and a half of open space here how big it a bit those are just regular double beds you could put a bigger bed up here I don't know if a queen or king would fit I mean I'm guessing and you can't the fly would actually explore as well here okay that's fine it's strong enough is it we have to be fairly careful with it but it's it's an inch thick being that these were plywood panels we basically cut holes or patterns in them to allow for the railings to meet the code where these are 4x4 holes which allows us to not have little babies crawl through them and whatever and we also drilled holes in the ceiling I think there's about 720 holes in each one of the pan above our heads here and basically that takes care of the sound control everything in here is very hard reverberation time is very important to us we actually use kind of almost like a woolen weed barrier and we stapled that up first and then with the weed barrier it allows the sound to kind of go back into it and filter it so it doesn't come back out when you're dealing with this type of a thing it looks fairly simple you know the table is very rugged it's very solid it's made out of you know the three quarter-inch Baltic burst but it takes a lot of planning you have to be able to do a computer drawing in order to give it to the guy who takes the CNC router and and so forth and I think that in some ways the digital world can meet the minimal world because the objects are not gigantic get some rollin to work I think the other thing that's kind of interesting is that you know you go to the hardware store with an idea in your head of what you were looking for and then it's kind of like a game to see if you can find it it's pretty low-tech it's kind of like the Archimedes screw concept where it's just geometry and then when you're done with geometry and if you thought it out well it basically works because in essence you're making one-of-a-kind type of objects and one of a kind one of the things we that we've definitely learned is that one-of-a-kind objects you basically don't know where you're going if we built ten of these we would know what happened on the eighth one so that we could do better the next time but when you do one-of-a-kind it's always a challenge to be trying to think of what the solution should be this is pretty low-tech that it all it is is a screw that comes out with a knob on it but again then we had to have the knowledge of how to place inserts into the wood so there's threaded way inside of there there's a threaded insert that takes care of where the bolt goes into that's threaded yeah it's not this off-the-shelf kind of stuff other than you need to have like I had 100 $10,000 router in order to cut the pieces this precise we would rent a machine by the hour and so now you're back to a table that can be used for games or eating the table becomes the centerpiece of of our 12 foot by 12 foot by 12 foot cube the funny thing about being in a cabin in northern Wisconsin my wife and her family came up north every 10 days and stayed for 10 days her dad was a conductor on the train and the value of a shower gets to be quite high our toilet is right underneath of the platform from up above the platform if you can see is only one inch thick so we only lost one inch of space this is the thickness of the platform we have special structural screws that have inserts here and you screw up into it and it clamps the piece of wood everything is mortise with the CNC router we built the door from scratch because we wanted the consistency of material this is two plies of 3/4 inch Baltic birch so there's about twenty two plies going all the way across this again our favorite the piano hinge it's lots of screws and lots of transferring of the weight of a heavy door because this is solid when you walk in here automatically this sensor senses body movement and it turns on the lights because we would have no way to run wires in these types of walls so we have the motion switch another thing that we have this is this is the party wall to the mechanical we have our main thermostat for the geothermal heating and cooling this is a heat recovery ventilator that we have ports that take air out of here that's moist and need to get expelled and then we bring fresh air in up above into the bedroom area where you sleep and it's very energy-efficient it saves like 70% of the heat energy when you do that and it also ventilates this area quite well and you take a shower we have a very simple sink we tried again to use all every every inch of space we have these little akia coat hooks that act as stops my wife keeps everything on this side and then we get toothbrushes on that side this is the only place we couldn't use because this is a plumbing vent that had to go up by code off of the sink itself here the shower is probably the most important part of northern cabin living and so that this is like a four foot by four foot shower so that you basically don't feel cramps and everything in this area floats back into where the drain is so it's all just one monolithic concrete boy yeah and you do the kitchen so we've got a small refrigerator here pretty limited but gets its the job done so we have a well here with really fresh drinking water [Music] we've had comments that people could never live in here because there's only one sink and not a double sink when we have a meal and you need to cook a lot of things you have to be a lot more patient we thought our microwave was going to be the end-all answer to it it was a convection microwave I'm not sure that the microwave has done everything that we've asked it to do but it sure warms up the coffee in the morning my wife comments all the time about how hard it is to sit on wood but I think there's somewhat of a poetic justice to sitting on a bench and feeling the wood saying that well maybe now I want to get stand up and do something else or be outside and I think that you know we do have some cushions for guests but it this really is an experiment on how to live with less when you come here there is no TV and we listen to music and you know music in nature and kind of goes together or you are in Wisconsin where Frank Lloyd Wright was from and he took many of his earlier patterns from nature so in the the concrete slab you'll see that there's the imprint of some leaves this is another example of something that was kind of serendipitous when we were building this so it was a windy day when we were pouring this slab and believes kept falling into the slab and so as we were picking them off we were looking at the interesting pattern that was left in the slab and then we started to say well maybe we should actually leave these in there and then we threw a few more on ourselves just to play it up even further I spoke here you have a maple right here this is my favorite a bass wood tree which is kind of a northern Wisconsin type of tree and the one that wasn't so successful these needles right here these are these are white pines and then as we would trowel them they would get wispy and changed their shape and they wouldn't look just like needles but actually our favorite the cedar which is a northern in Wisconsin and like this one still if you want to come by you can always pick something out of it and you have the cedar branch right there the cube of the building right here that we're in is 12 foot by 12 foot people have always asked me don't I feel that I'm confined in this area and I basically say no that when I look to the north I see a beautiful forest and when I look to the south i I see Pikes Bay it's just so close to nature [Music]

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 724,733

Keywords: prefab housing, prefab architecture, modular construction, modular architecture, tiny home, small space, small home, tiny house, home size, simple living, simplicity, cabin, tiny cabin, demountable home, dismountable home, panel architecture, Lake Superior, Wisconsin, EDGE cabin, revelations architecture, father son architects, mobile cabin, transformer cabin, handicap accesible, rainwater collection, passive solar, geothermal, butterfly roof

Id: mVEOTauSAPg

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 10 2017

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