Layers Man, Layers - The Amazing Wall House by Frohn & Rojas

I'm so tired of living in a regular American house - 2,200 square feet, 3 bedroom, 2 1/2 baths, study, basement - blah, blah, blah . When I see something really different I get excited. I am so blown away by this house in Chile by FAR - Frohn & Rojas that I saw on Your Abode .... Environmentality. The Wall House defies convention in so many ways. It's one of the most impressively different and innovative homes I've seen yet.





I really can't describe it any better than what FAR has written on their site:

"Suburban residence. As opposed to the general notion that our living environments can be properly described and designed “in plan”, this project is a design investigation into how the qualitative aspects of the wall, as a complex membrane, structure our social interactions and climatic relationships and enable specific ecologies to develop. The project breaks down the “traditional” walls of a house into a series of four delaminated layers ( concrete cave, stacked shelving, milky shell, soft skin ) in between which the different spaces of the house slip. From the inside out the layers build upon one another, both materially and geometrically, blurring the boundary between the interior and the exterior and creating, through the specificity of the different materials used (many of which are not common in architectural applications), a series of qualitatively distinct environments. The building's most standout feature, an energy screen typically used in greenhouse construction, constitutes the outermost layer, creating not only a diffused lighting and comfortably climatized zone inside but also, through its folding and sometimes- reflective/sometimes-translucent surface, contributes to the diamond-cut appearance of the structure."

Suburban residence?????? Not in my neighborhood, unfortunately. I applaud the approach, the originality, the materials, the style, the unconventional take. Just out of this world cool.










I love the idea of layers. That's something different for a house. It works for clothing, it should work for a house too. I don't think the outer "soft skin" would last long in a Michigan winter. But I don't know why we can't build a house that can adapt and change more for the seasons with multiple layers, maybe some that are removable/retractable/reconfigurable to respond to different climate conditions for different times of the year. Why just have one wall system that has to do it all, all the time? Something to think about.

The Wall House is something really different and very intriguing. I'm still continually amazed by how many unique solutions there are to the problem of housing, and I'm hopeful that we'll open our minds to the possibilities.

Via Your Abode .... Environmentality.

Image credits - FAR site