Glass is probably the most psychologically loaded materials in structure. It guarantees transparency and delivers ambiguity, reads as weightless whereas demanding extraordinary structural engineering, and has the unusual property of constructing a constructing concurrently current and absent relying on the place you stand and what the sunshine is doing. Architects have been exploiting these contradictions since Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in 1851, and the dialog has by no means actually stopped. F-Home, a personal residence on Lake Washington in Kirkland, Washington, designed by Goble Berriman Design with facade specialist Pulp Studio, pushes that dialog to a spot most residential architects would take into account genuinely unreasonable.
The temporary, issued by a consumer working within the laptop gaming trade, was a single directive: construct a crystal home. What adopted was years of design improvement, engineering collaboration, and customized fabrication to provide a house with zero standard exterior cladding. Each floor is glass, reduce into angular, irregular panels that assemble right into a faceted type impressed by shattered ice erupting by means of terrain. The metal construction supporting all of it’s hidden. The fixings are hid. Even drainage particulars disappear behind customized direct-to-glass printed borders, as a result of Goble Berriman understood that one seen downspout would break the whole phantasm.
Designer: Goble Berriman Design & Pulp Studio
The pedigree behind this venture deserves context. Stuart Berriman spent years at The Jerde Partnership engaged on large-scale mixed-use developments throughout Asia earlier than co-founding Goble Berriman. Companion Angus Goble was a founding member of Entrance Inc., a number one facade consultancy whose consumer listing included Frank Gehry, OMA, Herzog and de Meuron, and SANAA. That lineage issues right here, as a result of F-Home reads much less like an formidable residential venture and extra like a commercial-grade facade engineering train that occurs to include bedrooms. The crystalline exterior geometry, which shifts from mirror-flat reflectivity to deep angular shadow relying on the hour, is the type of work you anticipate from companies working at institutional scale, not on a personal lakeside lot in Kirkland.
The house spans 7,300 sq. toes and sits surrounded by pure rock formations and dense Pacific Northwest greenery, with Mount Rainier seen throughout the water. That panorama pairing is doing actual compositional work. The onerous, faceted glass pores and skin reads in opposition to the softness of the firs and boulders as a deliberate counterpoint, the identical logic that makes mineral specimens so visually arresting while you set them in opposition to natural matter. The constructing doesn’t attempt to mix into its web site. It proclaims itself as one thing overseas to the pure order, which, given the crystal temporary, is exactly right.
The thermal and privateness engineering required to make a totally glazed home really livable is the place the venture earns its most critical design credibility. Double silver-coated glass handles the primary residence, whereas solar-protected glass was chosen for the winter backyard. Low-emissivity coatings regulate temperature throughout the envelope, and customized dot-pattern shading improves vitality efficiency with out introducing seen blinds or screens that might compromise the outside studying. Every glass unit is a layered meeting with an air hole and Saflex interlayers that may shift from clear to opaque, giving occupants management over privateness with out resorting to curtains. Insulated spandrel panels deal with transitions the place stable building was unavoidable. The result’s a home that performs like a thermally accountable constructing whereas trying prefer it was assembled from a single steady materials.
The inside format is organized round a winter backyard that acts as a central divider, separating the primary residence from the studio and storage, the latter that includes a glazed hangar door. A steady skylight stretches from the entry by means of to the eating space and backyard terraces, and a glass bridge connects to the master suite, turning what would ordinarily be a hall right into a suspended, luminous passage. Goble Berriman ran the whole venture by means of a shared 3D mannequin throughout each marketing consultant and contractor, and the home-owner navigated the design in VR goggles lengthy earlier than building started. By the point the constructing was completed, it felt totally acquainted to the consumer, affirmation that years of immersive pre-visualization had achieved their job in a manner that no flat drawing ever might.
F-Home sits in a practice of glass structure that runs from Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth Home by means of Philip Johnson’s New Canaan Glass Home and into the parametric facade work of the final twenty years. What separates it from most of that lineage is the refusal of orthogonal geometry. There are not any flat planes assembly at proper angles right here, no clear curtain wall logic. Each panel is its personal negotiated form, and the entire facade behaves extra like a reduce gemstone than a constructing pores and skin. Whether or not that reads as probably the most literal consumer temporary ever executed, or as a genuinely new formal proposition for residential glass structure, in all probability is determined by the place you’re standing and what the sunshine is doing. On the shores of Lake Washington with Mount Rainier within the background, I’d argue it’s each.
