Project Team
Architect: Endemic Architecture
Structural Engineer: Hewitt Consulting Group
Status: Unbuilt
Perched on a 10 acre hillside in rural Yuba County, California among rock outcroppings, manzanita trees, and evergreens is the proposed Heart Rock House. The small footprint, only 270sf, belies a three story, 650sf tower meant to serve as a retreat. A series of intersecting barrel vaults carve away the base of the cabin, where it meets the ground, to minimize its footprint while fostering a continuous landscape in which rocks, grasses, people, and critters move under and through. This vaulted undercroft further serves as a covered porch with areas for seating, dining, storage, and a semi-enclosed shower.
The geometry above the vaulted bottom is two story cubic-pyramidal volume with areas for lounging, games, sleeping, and contemplation. Two ‘outlook nooks’ provide intimately scaled crannies to burrow into. Lined with faux fur and crushed velvet, these nooks perfect for self-reflection, reading, resting, journaling, or simply staring out over the landscape. A thrid level offers sleeping quarters with an elevated balcony for maximum views of the western valley.
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Overtime, the cork facade transforms from a dark brown to a silvery gray. On one hand, the bold massing of the geometry standsout against the lush hillside, yet on the other hand the carved bottom and cork facade merge into the landscape over time. The oscillation between foreign and familiar situate the cabin as something like a folly in a garden.
As is often the case with our work in rural contexts, we began by creating a fluid site plan made with ink, dye, salt, and water. Rather than representing exact reality or fixed boundaries, these “drawings” promote a conceptual approach to understanding landscape, geology, and architecture as mutually informing each other, entangled in dynamic relationships ground and building, natural and built forces, blurry and sharp edges. These drawings illuminate both a real and a conceptual necessity of the ground, through which various aesthetics emerge. In the case of the Heart Rock House, this led to an understanding of the vault legs acting like a series of stones in the landscape, from which the cabin is structured, while the vegetated landscape moves through and around them. Yet, the abstract landscape is distilled from color gradtions into lines and curves which are projected up and through the volume of the cabin, creating a series of arcs, bends, and curves in the walls and ceilings of the interior.
