WINTER HOUSE_Fragile Shelter Project. Fantastic Flood-Proof House Designed to Break Free & Float. It has to be said: this incredible New Orleans home design from Morphosis is making waves in the architectural community.
In case of flooding, this home does not simply drift off – rather, it rises up on the water but remains tethered to vertical guides that keep it from floating away, essentially the ultimate in luxury battery-powered life rafts. Yet another project sponsored by Bran Pitt and his Make It Right Foundation, this home is designed to be modern, stylish and sustainable but also to remain modest, functional and contextual. In short: this house design is creative, innovative and its anti-flood flotation capabilities are all wonderful but it also compliments the historic residential aesthetic of the area. John Paananen. Small Mobile Homes: Bike Trailers & Shopping Cart Campers. Ruins to Resort: Medieval Town Gets Postmodern Makeover. A ruin can be a priceless piece of antiquity – or a worthless pile of rotting timber and crumbling stone when left to waste away in the elements.
This may be the most daring building conversion of our times – a collection of castle-like ruins on top of a hill that has been radically remodeled into something barely recognizable as a paid retreat. Maybe the name Million Dollar Donkey should have been a clue that this is not the kind of stay the typical tourist is expecting. A bed hangs in the hair – cantilevered out in space, suspended within a steel mesh cage – not at all an experience one expects to find on a cozy getaway in some ancient castle space.
There is something gritty and real about this place – clearly-new construction adds a layer to the existing architecture rather than seeking to detract from or overwhelm it. Steel girders support spartan beds and minimalist interventions make the rooms seem barely habitable, but in a strangely good way. Suburban Nomad: Hybrid Igloo, Yurt, Tent + Tipi Home Idea. The juxtaposition of such lifestyle extremes – fixed-space suburban living and nomadic world-travel dwelling – makes for a fascinating conceptual challenge.
It was, in fact, similarly neighboring opposites that gave rise to the idea in the mid of design student living on a lovely nature-filled campus but surrounded by suburbia on all sides. John Paananen took it upon himself to discover what would happen if he were to make over one of the most mobile kinds of traditional buildings – the tipi, with inspiration from its yurt, tent and igloo cousins – turning it into a stationary home with all of the creature comforts to be found in contemporary suburbs.
Instead of a portable and organically-evolved design, he chose to force-fit the general shape and style of a conventional nomadic dwelling into the space and settings. The results? Eccentric Aesthetics: DIY Eco-Friendly Earthbag Homes. Deformed Dome: Bamboo Hut Builds on a Modeling Mistake. People marvel at the final digital renderings and physical representations created by architects and architecture students.
Rarely, however, does the public get get to see the study models that are an essential part of the design process – even rare still: a finished product clearly based on a mistake that was made. This remarkable project was borne out of an error in the model-making process that became a real-life building opportunity. A student of? Pouya Khazaeli Parsa thought building a dome was fairly straightforward, and started creating one with full-length poles arcing up toward the center and back down along the opposite edge. Of course, there was a problem: with structural members so thick (magnified at miniature scale) the overlaps started to twist and torque the pure hemispherical shape desired. Instead of starting over, the student finished the model – the dynamic form was surprisingly compelling, and provided a shell-like opening along one end.