The site for this house project is on a hillside overlooking a picturesque bay on the northern tip of the South Island of New Zealand.  The charge for the house design was to design a larger than life house that also poetically interpreted the New Zealand culture and geography.  Also of interest to the client is the multi-national collaboration and communication.  The two bedroom, one bathroom weekend house of approximately 2,250 s.f. and will be used as a retreat from the client’s main house approximately 45 minutes away. 

The resulting design utilizes a sculptural concrete frame with a glass and timber weather enclosure.  An oversized exterior terrace firmly links the composition to the earth while the cantilevered balcony orients the house from the hillside toward the bay with slightly zoomorphic overtones.  The upper, open living and kitchen area face south and north, and the lower, divided bedroom wing has opens east and west.  They are perpendicular to one another and are linked via an internal staircase. 

The plan layout of the house has a symmetrical body and an asymmetrical wing to one side.  This formal layout of the house can perhaps best be understood by considering the form of the single outrigger canoe.  In this vessel type, a single, relatively unstable, yet symmetrical, hull is balanced and supported through buoyancy and dead weight by an asymmetrical outrigger with pontoon.  The house, not having similar functional requirements, utilizes only the formal symmetry of the canoe type.  When juxtaposed to the house, this composition is intended to be both highly monumental and informal at the same time.

On one level, the house deals with permanency and temporarily.  The house uses an architectural frame of poured in place concrete to form an apriori sculptural skeleton over which a more temporal glass and wood frame is intertwined to form the final living volume.  Though erected simultaneously, the conversation between these two systems alludes to time insofar as the original concrete skeleton can be visualized as either having existed before the house, and/or existing sometime in the future as an abstract ruin once the more temporal enclosures of glass and wood have weathered away.  Of course both systems are to be erected simultaneously and are dependent on one another for the typical functions of a house, the intent is to gesture to other times and civilizations well in advance and well after the current New Zealand culture. 

The bridging living volume frames oversized terracing stairs which connect the house to the shore.  The scale and sculptural form of these stairs allude to the primordial power of the island nation’s landscape. 

As a counterpoint to the serial site stairs is the singular, cantilevered balcony.  The precise metaphorical relationship of stairs to cantilever is a bit open-ended; however, they serve together to give a certain zoomorphic frontality to the house as it faces the water and horizon.   

On one level the house certainly has roots in the language of modernism with overtones of a more contemporary minimalism.  However, this architect intends more of a process reductivism.  Reductivism insofar as the meaning and multi-visual associations of the house elements are given more emphasis and power through the suppression of extraneous elements.  Minimalism can often through the baby out with the bath water. 

Of particular technical interest in achieving the particular sculptural aims of the house is a unique spandrel condition of the floor of the bridging living area.  It is intended that the glass with be laminate, and a mirroring insert will conceal the floor structure beyond.