This house is a tower rising above the rolling topography of its cherry orchard site, peering outwards toward spectacular westward views of Lake Michigan and the surrounding agricultural landscape. The site is left minimally disturbed, other than the mounding of two earthen enclosures adjacent to the tower, utilizing the excavated earth of the foundation and offering a ground bound contrast to the tower experience above the treescape.
A house would appear as an unsympathetic intrusion in this pure landscape, and with its singular vertical presence rising above the orchard, the tower is intended to reflect the austere, scaleless non-particularity of the occasional farm buildings dotted elsewhere on the hills. To help mask the scale and house program window requirements of the structure, the building is wrapped in a skirting wall of recycled translucent polyethelene slats, standing two feet out from the galvanized sheet metal cladding of the wall surface, on aluminum frames that serve also as window washing platforms and emergency exit structures. The translucent polyethylene material set out over the dully reflective wall cladding is chosen for its ability to gather the light and color of its landscape, dissolving the finely shadowed and inexplicably haloed structure into the seasonal color cycle of snow and ice and black twig tracery; pale pink blossom clouds; pollen green leaf and grass; golden straw and vivid foliage.
from andersonanderson
