Tag Archives: houses

Young Projects’ Cut Out House Proves Subtraction Is the Most Powerful Tool in Architecture

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Most mountain houses try too hard. Cut Out House, designed by New York-based studio Young Projects, does the opposite — it sits in the foothills of the Canadian Rocky Mountains, tucked into a low-density development where the land does most of the talking.

The project was conceived as a family vacation home, and it wears that intention openly. Rather than asserting itself against the landscape, the house responds to it — balancing intimate spaces oriented toward the dense surrounding woodland with communal areas that open dramatically toward the mountains. That duality is the architecture. Everything else follows from it.

Designer: Young Projects

The defining move is the butterfly roof, which Young Projects uses not just as a formal gesture but as a tool for orchestrating experience. The angled planes slope in opposite directions, directing views outward from within while reflecting the terrain’s gradient from outside. Where the roofline climbs, communal living spaces claim the panoramic views. Where tree density compresses the sightlines, private bedrooms pull back into quieter, more sheltered corners of the plan. The roof, in a sense, is the planner.

The “cut out” in the name refers to a series of subtractions carved from the building’s overall volume — openings and recesses that give the house its sculptural character without overworking it. This is a form shaped as much by removal as by addition. The result reads as something confidently simple, which is the harder thing to achieve. Most houses at altitude either defer too much to the landscape or compete with it. Cut Out House does neither.

Gray Accoya wood clads the exterior, a material choice that ages gracefully and lends the structure a tonal continuity with the rock and timber of the surrounding terrain. It doesn’t announce itself. From across a nearby body of water, the butterfly roofline is the first thing you read — a dynamic silhouette that shifts with the light and suggests movement even when the house is still.

Bryan Young founded Young Projects in New York in 2010, and the studio has built a reputation for work that thinks carefully about the relationship between built form and context. Cut Out House extends that sensibility into alpine territory, where the stakes of getting that relationship wrong are immediately visible in every window. The house doesn’t compete with the Rockies. It leans into them, shapes itself around them, and in doing so becomes something more interesting than a retreat — it becomes a calibrated act of looking.

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Europe’s Largest 3D-Printed Apartment Building Just Changed Everything

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Something significant happened in Bezannes, France — and the construction industry should be paying close attention. ViliaSprint², Europe’s largest 3D-printed apartment building, has been completed, and it arrives less as a proof of concept and more as a genuine blueprint for what housing could look like moving forward. Developed by Plurial Novilia, designed by HOBO Architecture, and printed by PERI 3D Construction using a COBOD BOD2 printer, this is the kind of project that makes you reconsider what a building even is.

The numbers are striking. Twelve social housing apartments across three floors, 800 square meters of living space — all printed on-site in just 34 days, down from an originally planned 50. That alone would be a headline. But what makes ViliaSprint² genuinely remarkable is that it’s the first building in France where both the load-bearing structure and every wall were printed directly on-site, with 100% of all loads transferred through the 3D-printed walls. No hybrid workarounds. No conventional skeleton hiding beneath the surface. The printer did the heavy lifting, quite literally.

Designer: Plurial Novilia & HOBO Architecture

HOBO Architecture’s design leans into the honesty of the medium. The building’s rounded geometry — fluid curves that would cost a fortune to achieve through conventional formwork — is made possible precisely because a machine, not a tradesperson, is doing the forming. It’s design that could only exist with this technology, which is a rarer claim than it sounds. Timber balcony structures offset the weight of the concrete shell, adding warmth to a building that could otherwise read as cold and industrial.

Sustainability is baked into the structure rather than retrofitted onto it. The optimized curved form saved roughly 10% of concrete volume. Holcim supplied the printable concrete using its TectorPrint technology within the CO₂-reduced ECOPact range, reinforced with synthetic macro fibres. Perlite insulation, 500 square meters of photovoltaic panels, and a hybrid gas-heat pump system by Atlantic Systèmes push the building to around 60% energy self-sufficiency — fully compliant with France’s RE2020 2025 green building targets.

The building sits directly beside a conventionally constructed twin, built by the same developer simultaneously, as a live comparison. The 3D-printed version finished three months ahead. It also required only three workers to erect the walls, compared to six for the conventional build — a meaningful detail as the construction industry faces deepening skilled labor shortages.

Plurial Novilia is already planning the next move: roughly 40 apartments, two printers running simultaneously, with a target to cut print time by a factor of four. ViliaSprint² isn’t the destination. It’s the proof that the destination is real.

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This Carbon-Negative Neighborhood in the Netherlands Is Rethinking Affordable Housing

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Architecture has long been one of the planet’s most significant contributors to carbon emissions. ORGA, a Dutch studio, is challenging that reality head-on with a carbon-negative neighborhood prototype built in the village of Marknesse, Netherlands — and the results are worth paying attention to.

Commissioned by housing association Mercatus, the project consists of 12 affordable rental homes designed specifically for first-time buyers and low-income households. From the outset, the goal was to minimize environmental impact at every stage — not as an afterthought, but as the foundation of every design decision made.

Designer: ORGA

Marknesse sits in a region historically defined by its ‘Delft Red’ aesthetic: red clay bricks and orange-red roof tiles. Rather than abandon that visual identity, ORGA reinterpreted it through a modern lens, swapping out high-carbon materials for natural, renewable alternatives. The result is something rare in contemporary construction — a structure that stores more carbon than it produces. The architects also wove local ecology into the design, incorporating wooden chimneys that double as nesting sites for bats.

The numbers behind the project are striking. The prototype achieves a 76% share of bio-based and circular raw materials. Nearly everything is sourced from renewable materials, with the exception of the concrete foundation and essential components like windows and fasteners. It’s an approach that echoes projects like the 3D-printed Lib Earth House Model B in Japan, which similarly replaces cement with soil-based mixtures to reduce material impact.

Construction efficiency was also a priority. The homes are built using prefabricated timber elements manufactured off-site and assembled on-site, a method that dramatically cuts construction time while reducing local disruption. This mirrors what’s been seen in mass timber projects like the 230 Royal York tower in Toronto, where prefabrication trimmed months off the build schedule.

Inside, the timber framing is insulated with wood fiber and other natural materials, enabling a completely foil-free, vapor-permeable construction. There are no synthetic plastic wrapping layers. Instead, the wall system is breathable — designed to passively regulate moisture and temperature without air conditioning or mechanical intervention. The building essentially manages its own climate.

To close the loop on long-term sustainability, each home was cataloged using the Madaster Material Passport, an online dossier that tracks all materials and their applications. Residents also received user manuals to help them maintain and eventually repurpose components of the home. What ORGA has built in Marknesse is more than a prototype. It’s a proof of concept that bio-based, affordable, and carbon-negative architecture can coexist — and that meaningful ecological design doesn’t have to come at the cost of accessibility.

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This House in Rural India Is Actually a Bridge — and It’s Covered in Scales

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Most architects would see a seven-metre-deep gorge cutting through a site and call it a problem. Vinu Daniel and his studio, Wallmakers, looked at it and saw the house. The Bridge House in Karjat, Maharashtra, is exactly what its name promises — a weekend home that spans a 30-metre-wide spillway, with enough clearance below for diggers to pass through. Completed in 2025, the 4,500-square-foot structure sits across two parcels of land separated by two streams, and it does so with a quiet, almost organic confidence.

The structural logic is deceptively simple. Four hyperbolic parabolas form the spine of the suspension bridge, held together by minimal steel pipe and tendons working in tension. Over that skeleton, a grid of steel cables was laid out in a twisting hyperbolic paraboloid surface, then coated in a layer of mud — the same material Wallmakers has long treated as a primary architectural medium. The mud isn’t decorative. It provides the compressive strength that stabilises the entire bridge and acts as a barrier against the pests that typically undermine thatched construction.

Designer: Wallmakers

And then there’s the skin. The outer layer is local grass thatch, applied in overlapping scales that give the structure a texture closer to a living creature than a building. The resemblance to a pangolin is intentional. “Thatched roof construction, even though sustainable and thermally efficient, has been on the decline due to problems like pest invasion, lack of skilled labour, deforestation, and the hassle of constant reapplication,” Daniel noted. The mud-thatch composite here attempts to address exactly those failures — rethinking the material from the inside out rather than simply reviving a tradition.

Getting materials to the site was its own challenge. The remote location in Karjat pushed the team toward using what was available locally, which ultimately shaped the entire material palette. The result is a building that feels pulled from the landscape rather than dropped into it. Translucent screens and raw mud surfaces define the interiors, keeping the atmosphere spare and tactile. The design team — Preksha Shah and Ramika Gupta — worked within tight constraints that only tightened the design thinking.

Bridge House is the kind of project that makes the site’s difficulties readable in the finished form. The gorge isn’t hidden; it’s the reason the house exists at all. That honesty — structural, material, spatial — is what makes Wallmakers’ work consistently worth paying attention to.

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This Traditional Japanese Home Was Brought Back to Life by Opening It Up to Everything Around It

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Returning home is a deeply intentional process. Not just to a place, but to a life — one shaped by memory, family, and the particular quality of light that falls through a familiar window. That is precisely the spirit YNAS brought to House in Miyakonojo, a renovation and extension of a traditional timber home in southern Japan that quietly redefines what it means to belong somewhere.

The project began with a couple who, after raising their children and shifting careers, chose to return to the wife’s ancestral home in Miyakonojo to live alongside her father. The house carried history in its bones — a traditional layout of rooms partitioned by sliding screens, arranged off a dark, L-shaped corridor that kept the living area, kitchen, dining room, and bedroom firmly separated from one another. It was a home that had turned inward, closing itself off from both the people inside and the landscape beyond its walls.

Designer: YNAS

YNAS dismantled that introversion entirely. The studio opened up the cramped internal layout, dissolving the rigid partitions to let space breathe and flow the way a home shared between generations should. The transformation is not just structural — it’s philosophical. The design rejects the idea that privacy requires enclosure, leaning instead into a more generous, paradoxical logic: that openness itself can become a form of protection.

That thinking is most visible in the corrugated metal canopies YNAS added to the exterior. Timber-framed and industrial in material, they extend the home outward, creating covered outdoor spaces that blur the threshold between inside and out. An outdoor kitchen and a wood-fired bath become part of daily life, not luxuries tucked away from it. Neighbors might catch a distant glimpse of the family gathered outside, or notice smoke rising from the stove — and that, the studio argues, is the point.

“The house once again becomes a part of the landscape through the ‘signs of life’ it emits,” YNAS noted of the project. It’s a rare architectural position — one that treats visibility not as exposure but as community, as a soft signal that a home is lived in and loved.

The result is a house that honors its past without being imprisoned by it. The ancestral bones remain, but the rooms now open to each other, to the garden, to the sky. Corrugated metal and old timber sit side by side without apology. Three generations share space under a roof that has finally learned how to exhale. In Miyakonojo, YNAS has done something quietly radical: they’ve made a home feel, again, as it belongs to the world around it.

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Four Meters by Four Meters: How Tadao Ando Made Constraint Beautiful

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Perched on the coast of the Seto Inland Sea in Tarumi-ku, Kobe, the 4×4 House by Tadao Ando occupies a narrow coastal strip that Japanese authorities had not even considered constructible. That is exactly why Ando built there. Completed in 2003, the house rose in the shadow of the Great Hanshin earthquake, a catastrophe that reshaped the region and the consciousness of everyone who lived through it. Ando’s response was not to build bigger or safer in the conventional sense.

It was to build with precision — a four-story reinforced concrete tower with a footprint of just four meters by four meters. Sixteen square meters of floor area, multiplied upward toward the sky. The name is the blueprint.

Designer: Tadao Ando

At 13.4 meters tall, the structure reads less like a residence and more like a sentinel. Its silhouette evokes a watchtower — upright, deliberate, scanning the horizon. Ando sank the foundations deep into the ground to resist lateral forces, and at the base, a square concrete patio disappears beneath the waterline when the tide comes in. The boundary between architecture and ocean is intentionally blurred. Living here means accepting the sea as a roommate.

The interior climbs through a vertical sequence of rooms, each floor stacked with the discipline of a column. What makes the composition unusual is the top floor — a cube shifted slightly off-axis from the floors below, a geometric move that feels almost offhand but transforms the entire silhouette. Light enters in controlled bursts. Views are framed like paintings. Nothing is accidental.

Not long after the first house was finished, a second client commissioned Ando to build an identical tower on the neighboring plot. The result is a pair of concrete twins standing side by side on the coastline, same in form but different in material — a duality Ando had quietly envisioned from the beginning. The two buildings share no physical connection. They stand together, facing the sea, as if in silent conversation.

The 4×4 House is not a comfortable building in the traditional sense. It is a provocation — a proof that constraint, when embraced fully, becomes its own kind of freedom. Ando took a strip of coastline that the city had written off and turned it into one of the most discussed residential structures of the 21st century. Sixteen square meters at a time.

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Inside the Log-and-Glass Home Olson Kundig Built for a Builder on Salt Spring Island

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Salt Spring Island doesn’t need much convincing — it already has the cliffs, the meadows, and the trees. The name sounds more like a childhood storybook setting than an architectural statement — and that tension is exactly the point. Nestled amidst the trees and rugged cliffs of Salt Spring Island, BC, the Daisy Ranch is Olson Kundig’s most recent residential project, led by design principal Tom Kundig. It’s casual. It’s rugged. And it’s entirely, unapologetically itself.

The house sits at the edge of a sweeping meadow, anchored by a log structure that feels like it could have always been there. The primary move is a rugged glass box paired with a long, cantilevered roof that stretches over a generous deck — a roof that earns its keep through BC’s shifting seasons, offering shelter without closing anything off. What makes it work visually is the layering: large square-cut logs and glass soften the rust-colored patina of weathered steel cladding, giving the exterior a palette that feels earned rather than designed.

Designer: Olsun Kundig

The plan is organized along a clean linear axis, with two distinct volumes bisected by an eastern entry stairway. The front door is tucked under a generous overhang — a small but considered gesture that grounds the arrival sequence without dramatizing it. The northern volume, clad in wood and steel, handles the private program: a primary suite and additional bedrooms, with framed view corridors that offer deliberate glimpses of the landscape rather than full exposure. Privacy and connection, calibrated carefully.

Inside, the bathroom is where the project gets most personal. Widespread use of wood infuses the space with warmth, while a clawfoot tub set before corner windows underscores the home’s persistent connection to the landscape outside. It’s the kind of detail that feels borrowed from an older, more tactile way of building — which is precisely the intention.

The project was designed in close collaboration with the client, Patrick Powers, a builder and fabricator who also served as general contractor. That relationship left its mark. The house doesn’t feel like it was delivered to a site; it feels like it was made with the site, material decision by material decision.

As Kundig put it: “There’s a lineage at play in this project, a quiet innovation that comes from the shared DNA of materials and relationships.” The Daisy Ranch is the kind of project that doesn’t need to announce itself. It sits lightly on its land, opens wide to its meadow, and gets on with the business of being lived in.

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Casa Pinhal Proves the Best Brazilian Architecture Barely Touches the Ground

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Deep in the Serra da Mantiqueira, where the air is thin and the forest floor barely registers sunlight, Cornetta Arquitetura has completed Casa Pinhal — a 690-square-metre residence in Santo Antônio do Pinhal, São Paulo, that reads less like a building dropped into nature and more like one that grew out of it.

The site is demanding by any measure: a 4,900-square-metre plot with a steep incline and dense native vegetation already well established across it. Rather than fight the terrain, lead architect Pedro Cornetta made the land itself the primary design brief. The project was guided by one clear principle — touch the ground as little as possible. The result is a holiday house that gives its guests the impression of walking among trees rather than beside them.

Designer: Cornetta Arquitectura

The structural language is built around glued laminated timber (MLC — Madeira Laminada Colada) and wood frame construction, executed in collaboration with Rewood using eucalyptus sourced for the project. Rewood completed the entire timber structure in just 30 days — 40 cubic metres of glulam going up with a pace that conventional concrete construction rarely allows. The system combines a column beam frame, a trapezoidal sandwich roof, dry panel floor slabs, and wood frame walls, all working together as a prefabricated assembly that keeps the site footprint minimal and the build time compressed.

Inside, the material palette is quieter than the engineering behind it. Wood, concrete, and expansive glass panels define the interior volumes — a combination that Cornetta has refined across several projects, but here feels especially deliberate given the forest density outside. At night, the house undergoes a shift: internal lighting catches the grain of the timber, bounces off the concrete, and filters through the glass, turning what is a disciplined structure by day into something closer to a lantern. It’s the kind of detail that separates a house that photographs well from one that actually earns its place on a hillside.

Casa Pinhal sits in a lineage of work from Cornetta Arquitetura that treats sustainability not as an add-on feature but as a structural argument. Like Casa Guapuruvus before it — positioned to avoid disturbing existing flora and elevated off the ground to protect wildlife — Casa Pinhal was placed where native vegetation was already under stress, turning conservation into a site strategy rather than a branding point.

It’s a house built with the kind of restraint that takes real confidence. And in the Mantiqueira mountains, restraint might be the loudest architectural statement you can make.

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The Forest Came First. The House Came Second. That Was Always the Plan.

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Most architects are handed a site and told to make something of it. Luiz Volpato was handed a forest and told not to ruin it. House 17-JB, completed in 2022 within the Jardins do Batel condominium in Curitiba, southern Brazil, grew out of a deeply personal brief: a client of Italian descent, a self-professed architecture enthusiast, wanted to find not just land, but the ‘right’ land.

Together with the office, they eventually settled on a plot defined by two non-negotiable conditions — a protected native forest and a dramatically steep topography. Those constraints didn’t limit the project. They became it.

Designer: Luiz Volpato Architects

With occupation restricted to just 30% of the 2,300 square metre plot, and that footprint concentrated along the front portion of the land, the design team was forced to think vertically. The solution was elegant: four overlapping volumes, two elevated and two semi-underground, stacked in direct response to the terrain’s fall and the density of vegetation surrounding the site. The result is a 1,113 square metre home that feels both monumental and discreet, as if the building grew from the hillside rather than being placed on top of it.

Architecturally, the project sits at the intersection of modernism and brutalism, drawing on structural clarity, constructive rationality, and an honest approach to material selection. The material palette tells its own story: moss green upholstery, warm timber millwork, and stone surfaces work together to blur the boundary between inside and out. Natural textures sit alongside smooth finishes, creating an interior that reads as fluid and quiet rather than loud or performative.

On the upper floors, the intimate volume houses the suites and a family living area, with balconies positioned precisely at the height of the tree canopy. Living among the treetops rather than looking up at them is a subtle but powerful distinction, one that shapes the daily experience of the house in ways that no floor plan can fully capture.

The project has since gained international recognition, featured in Edra Magazine No. 5, launched in Milan. It is a fitting acknowledgment for what is, at its core, a study in restraint. Luiz Volpato and his team, alongside project coordinator Pablo Quintela, never tried to compete with the forest. They listened to it instead. House 17-JB is a reminder that the best architecture doesn’t impose a vision on a site. It finds the vision that was already there, waiting to be built.

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This Nova Scotia Home Floats Above the Land on Steel Legs and Changes Nothing Beneath It

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There’s a certain restraint in the decision to let a building hover. Not every architect earns that move. Along the rugged Atlantic coastline of Nova Scotia, Canadian studio Omar Gandhi Architects has completed the East River Residence — a home that doesn’t so much sit on the landscape as suspend itself above it, perched on slender steel columns that let the rocky terrain breathe freely underneath.

The project was conceived for a couple relocating from Montreal, trading city life for something quieter, more grounded, more defined by the presence of the Atlantic. On the first visit to the site, the architects followed the coastline inward through a dense stand of forest, arriving at a soft valley held between two steep, rocky inclines. That natural bowl — rather than being fought or filled — became the entire logic of the building.

Designer: Omar Gandhi Architects

The result is a home that reads like a bridge. It spans the depression between two embankments, and the terrain flows underneath it the way water would. Hidden from the shore by thick forest, the only way to encounter it is to go inland, walk along the coast, and let it reveal itself gradually — which feels entirely intentional. This isn’t a house that announces itself. It listens.

The roofline is where the architecture gets genuinely expressive. The gable follows the rhythm of the land below it — rising over the rocky outcrops, dipping low at the main living space to pull in southern light and create a sense of interior intimacy, then lifting again at the yoga studio to expand the room toward the sky. Each shift in section corresponds to a shift in how the space feels, and how the view outside changes with it.

Materially, the home stays close to its coastal context. The palette is dark and restrained — chosen to disappear into the treeline rather than compete with it. Steel, wood, and shadow do most of the talking. The structure was built by Blueprint Construction with structural engineering by Design Point, and the technical execution of suspending a full residence above challenging terrain is considered as the architecture itself.

Photographed by Felix Michaud, the images capture something that most architecture photography misses: the feeling of a building that genuinely belongs where it is. The East River Residence isn’t trying to conquer its site. It’s floating above it, quietly, letting the land remain exactly what it was — which, as architectural philosophies go, is a rare and admirable one.

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