Delighted that House of Four Ecologies joins the @thearchitecturalreview 2025 Shortlisted Houses cohort. Press release link in bio.
“The 15 projects shortlisted by the judging panel include homes from all over the world, from Brazil to Sweden to Japan…The private house occupies a unique position in both the history of architecture and human imagination. Beyond its core function of shelter, it is an object of fantasy, a source of delight, a talisman and a testing ground.
The judges were interested in houses that ‘not only solve a programme, but propose a possible world’. They paid particular attention to the way projects consider material ethics, constructive intelligence and dialogue with tradition, while also assessing the quality of the spatial experience and the buildings’ relationship with climate.”
An article on the project will be released in January.
Congrats to the team!
@hoangtnguyen@juney.lee@natashasadikin
Glacial Erratic (glacialerratic.us) is a collection of architecture-related explorations, directed by James Leng. It is a practice for built artifacts, as well as a repository for idea in photographic and written form. By invoking a specific geological phenomena, this entity orients the work through landscape, movement, time, and identity.
James is also a co-founder of @figure.office , an architectural practice focused on public and community oriented projects. Glacial Erratic then—in parallel, or in contrast—is an inward turning project, created by the necessity of respite: a space of making that is slower, softer, and more intimate. It is an identity born out of James’s time at @macdowell1907 , where ideas of entangling with the natural world eventually developed into The House of Four Ecologies.
Glacial Erratic prioritizes a reflective mode of making—towards nuance, mystery, and delight—especially in a reality that often demands pragmatism over enchantment. We seek collaborators and clients—artists, writers, naturalists—interested in creating work that is contemplative and unexpected.
Website design by @burrowlab
Floor plan, House of Four Ecologies
“…As a contextually responsive strategy, multiple smaller volumes become far more agile in physically navigating around the existing natural features on the site—most prominently a small cluster of windblown but healthy fir trees at its center. These four volumes dance between the trees in a delicate choreography that pays deference to their residency, taking advantage of their presence to protect from wind and frame view corridors to scenery afar.
Each of the four volumes specifically orients and captures a moment in this transitional ecological journey. The first volume tucks behind a fir tree, minimizing its presence from the street and neighbors’ views, and directs the living room westward to the ocean. The second volume emerges from the other side of the fir, featuring a sheltered courtyard screened from neighbors to the East, buffering the wind and encapsulating a small piece of the coastal groundscape for intimate viewing. The third volume contains a generous space centered around a large dining table flanked by the kitchen, opening to an outdoor deck to the West. The volume rotates towards a narrow view corridor between firs, looking to a woodland grove beyond. Finally the fourth volume houses the family room, turning yet again to face the open meadow to the North.”
- Excerpt from Design Narrative, TSRA DCEM Conceptual Design Submission, June 2022
Architecture: @juney.lee@jamesleng@hoangtnguyen@natashasadikin
Landscape: @hannahpae
A window for a tree / Provides sunlight for / Rooms for a rock
As we start prepping the House of Four Ecologies for photo documentation this Spring and Summer, some of the objects that inspired the design are brought into superimposition on location.
Rooms for a Rock was a sculpture experiment made at my @macdowell1907 residency, the experience of was a moment of genesis for the subsequent house project.
Coincidentally, the House of Four Ecologies will also eventually become a part time art residency to embody that same spirit and pay it forward - to give artists, simply, time and space.
Our House of Four Ecologies in Sea Ranch started construction last month and will be complete by this time next year. Architecture hardly seems real until you see in person the ground imprinted with the footprint of your aspirations, and the mess of it all.
Getting to this point has been odds-defying in the current economic environment. We look forward to embracing plenty of value engineering and unorthodox solutions in the days ahead. Of course all of this was only possible with @natashasadikin@juney.lee@hoangtnguyen and our illustrious landscape designer @hannahpae !
Looking forward to sharing more progress and images in the new year.
Field report from Louvre Lens:
The building shimmers in an otherworldly delight, even as the weathering of 11 years hasn’t been all too kind to the aluminum panels (unclear if it’s mis-maintenance or vandalism). The landscape has grown in, or overgrown, its whimsical figurations an important complement to the stark abstraction of the building’s material form.
To my preference we arrived on an overcast weekday when the museum was mostly devoid of people, an appropriately melancholy air for a mining town, maybe.
On the interior, the aluminum unexpectedly produces a pleasant softness. I enjoyed seeing the building, its razer-thin roof beams, its impossibly flat panels, quietly wrestle with sprinkler heads and other normies insisting SANAA return to reality at once. They don’t.
Not much to say about @atelierbrancusi other than what a dream it would be to devote life to shaping materials.
Peering through the vitrine into Brancusi’s humble skylit studio, Piano’s pavilion and Centre Pompidou join the ensemble, faintly, in the reflections.
Paris, August 2023
So much gratitude to @rick.kinsel and @vilcekfoundation for inviting me and @figure.office to design a birdhouse for the Foundation. We had the pleasure of learning how to work with wood, and embrace its knots, checks, cracks over many months, alongside collaborator and fabricator Robert Rising of @nycityslab . We photographed the sculpture in the nearby woodlands of a park in Yonkers before it moved to its final home upon a rooftop.
I can hardly believe it’s been exactly a year since @macdowell1907
I had wanted to write about the people I met and small revels I experienced upon my return but the sharp details have mostly been lost to the haze of time.
Still, I recall the dense woodlands and strange glacial erratics, and how it was one of the greatest joys to think about architecture amongst them.
The writers, poets, artists who conjured images, music, films, textiles, movement, memories and landscapes filled me with wonder, and made me wonder if architecture had to feel like such an island among the arts.
I’m also reminded how much I wanted to make work for my own whims than that of others, that creative output fundamentally needs to give sustenance to one’s own joy. (Still working on that one, slowly plotting away)
I forget what else. But this is a good reminder to think about it some more.
During our time in Italy we got to briefly witness the mountains of Carrara in the process of being transformed into building blocks.
@natashasadikin@j.roc.jih
