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Architects: Omer Arbel
Text description provided by the architects. Designed by Omer Arbel, House 23.2 is a family home built on a large rural area on the outskirts of Vancouver on the west coast of Canada. There's a gentle slope from east to west and two masses of forest that define two "outdoor rooms," each with its own ecology and different lighting conditions. The house is situated at the point of maximum tension between these two environments, defining them as distinct while also providing a transition between them.
The design of the house itself began, as a starting point, with a century-old stockpile composed of reclaimed fir beams from a series of burned-down warehouses. The beams were of varying lengths and cross-sectional dimensions, with astonishing proportions—some up to 20 meters long and 90 centimeters high. It was agreed that the beams would remain sacred objects in their current state and would not be manipulated or finished in any way.
Because the beams were of different lengths and sizes, the architect needed to achieve a geometry that could accommodate the enormous variety in dimension while allowing for the possibility of narrating legible spaces. A triangular geometry was settled upon.
Triangular wooden frames made from reclaimed beams were crossed to create the roof that would act as a second (and inhabited) landscape, bringing this artificial landscape over the gentle slope of the site. The folds were manipulated to implicitly and explicitly create relationships between the interior and exterior space in such a way that all interior rooms opened onto a corresponding exterior room.
To maximize the ambiguity between interior and exterior space, the definition of a significant corner of each room was removed by pulling the backing structure of the corner into itself, using bent steel columns. Accordion systems were also introduced in these open corners so that the entire facade on both sides of each corner could retract and disappear completely.
