Shadowboxx by Olson Kundig Architects

Architects: Olson Kundig Architects
Location: Lopez Island, Washington, USA
Year: 2009
Photos: Michael Burns, Tim Bies, Kevin Scott, and Benjamin Benschneider
Description:

Shadowboxx reacts to a craving to encourage a cozy comprehension of its setting and investigates the convention of social occasion around a flame. The site for this island retreat is a remote, breezy purpose of area in the San Juan Islands in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Tucked between a brush of trees and a rising bank, the house edges toward the feign with its fifty-foot drop to the and perspective of the Olympic Mountains past. Made out of a few components—living space, bathhouse, and private visitor room—Shadowboxx sits in a characteristic clearing made by the solid winds that compel back the trees from the rough bank.

The building deliberately confounds the conventional limits between a constructed structure and its environment. Its masses are demonstrated by winds off the water, outside cladding is permitted to climate and rust, and moving entryways, screens, dividers, and rooftops continually balance the edge in the middle of inside and outside.

In Kundig’s eyes, the house is more about the non-abrasiveness of shadows than about the hardness of items. Inside the home, layers are uncovered gradually. An exhibition runs the length of the house, with rooms spilling off it. Two steel-clad entryways slide open to uncover the primary living space, called the cloud space for its regularly evolving atmospherics.

A glass-walled bunkroom, it contains six specially crafted moving stages that serve both as couches and beds, empowering the room itself to transform in capacity. A steel stack channel opens to both the cloud room and the display and kitchen territory, and serves as an auxiliary backing. Outside overhang shades confront the water; they can be shut for assurance from the components or for security when the proprietor is away.

A visitor room sits toward one side of the house, and the bathhouse at the other. At the push of a catch, the sixteen-by-twenty-foot bathhouse rooftop can open like a stogie box cover; it is built with a 5,500-pound steel stabilizer, two steel turn pivots, and two sets of counter-turning lifting arms.

Material materials are utilized all through, including slammed earth floors, recovered oak floor boards, unpainted gypsum board and steel dividers, ridged steel siding and material, and recovered platform boards for the ceiling.