Architecture is what nature cannot make. Architecture is something unnatural but not something made up.
~ Louis Kahn
Design Composition
The DTS Project House design concept aims to reconcile two western ideals: the city and the garden. A vertical element establishes a presence on the urban approach to the property. One enters the property through an enclosed urban courtyard of total architecture that doubles as a motor court and a group event space. Exposed concrete walls stabilize and secure the hillside. An above ground, man-made water element (lap pool) marks the transition from city to garden. Two jewel like steel and glass horizontal boxes sit on and cantilever from the concrete walls. In the gap between the two steel boxes is a vertical space connecting ground and sky and housing the stair and glass elevator tower for vertical circulation. A stone fireplace mass visually roots the two transparent glass boxes to the hillside. The two cantilevered glass boxes are “wrapped” and protected with a freestanding, iconic shaped gabion wall and roof structure that literally filters the outside world. The position of the protective gabion structure in relation to the other design elements provides the dual experiences of a protective cave and the freedom of escape.
The architecture aims to both focus inward and look outward, providing intimate, protected shelter, and in the same building allow for an expansive, exposed experience of liberation.
Ideas exist for us alone by virtue of form. The form can never be detached from the idea; the means must be perfectly adapted to the end.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright