shelter
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.
Small Mobile Homes: Bike Trailers & Shopping Cart Campers
From colorful paintings and detailed line drawings of delivery trucks and mobile homes to actual full-scale bike-and-shopping-cart camper construction projects, artist and designer Kevin Cyr seems (healthily) obsessed with portable housing and mobile living.
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.
Ruins to Resort: Medieval Town Gets Postmodern Makeover
The juxtaposition of such lifestyle extremes – fixed-space suburban living and nomadic world-travel dwelling – makes for a fascinating conceptual challenge.
Suburban Nomad: Hybrid Igloo, Yurt, Tent + Tipi Home Idea
Yesterday’s steel bars are todays bamboo poles. Blinds and shades may add privacy, but do little to secure a property. A clever, cheap and green solution, this undulating sheet of bamboo does double-duty work (or triple, if you count the impressive aesthetic effect!).
Forest Facade: Bamboo Shoots Up, Shades & Fences House
The phrase “form follows function” has morphed in meaning over time and is, perhaps rightly, open to interpretation. One interesting extension of this idea is that the form of a building can follow the functions of its constituent parts – that the visual result can reflect the process of construction and that this, in turn, makes the architecture more educational or “honest” – a way to learn the history of a building simply by taking a look at how it was made. In addition to their do-it-yourself, easy-to-build and other sustainability-related benefits, “earth bag” homes – constructed of bags filled with local dirt, mud, sand and/or rock – are also potentially extremely expressive as works of design.
Eccentric Aesthetics: DIY Eco-Friendly Earthbag Homes
Like a UFO landed in the distance, this dome home is deceptively still – nothing about it immediately suggests that it has the secret ability to move. More than just a gimmick, these easy-to-rotate dome homes adjust to balance interior light and heat levels.
Rotating Eco-Friendly Dome Home Spins on a Central Axis
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.