The profile of the house is strangely familiar, having qualities of both the common pitched roof and the landscape in which it is sited. This in turn raises questions over its origins as something natural, artifactual or synthetic and where those boundaries occur. The house is formed of an assembly of sloped parts with different textures and material qualities, designed to welcome their natural state, eventually displaying atmospheric and nonhuman effects in and around its structure over time.  It looks to challenge the audacity of the white house in the landscape and instead develops new aesthetics of humbleness and embeddedness within its biome.  The resulting structure has a highly textural and pocketed building envelope, creating opportunities for non humans to colonise its boundaries. The human spaces inside are akin to ancient rock cut architecture, giving the sense of a carved monolith, protecting its inhabitants from the harsh coastal weather whilst providing views across the sea.

​

The project aims to move beyond the sweetness of the current architecture- nature dialogues commonly implemented as green planted facades. It instead considers the wider natural and atmospheric actors that comprise our environment and how they manifest in our buildings, ultimately attempting to move from an aesthetics of nature to an aesthetics of ecology. 

 

A strange yet familiar house by the sea explores new ecological aesthetics in architecture