Tag Archives: organic architecture

A green roof helps this villa in Norway to blend in with the surrounding countryside

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Villa Aa is a countryside residence in Norway built with a green roof to be in harmony with the surrounding environment.

The style of organic architecture looks no further than the land for inspiration. In an effort to not disrupt the preexisting landscape, organic architecture forms homes that move in harmony with nature, not against it. Norway architecture firm C.F. Møller recently finished work on their latest organic architecture undertaking, Villa Aa.

Designer: C.F. Møller

Invisible from far distances, Villa Aa retreats into the sloping hillside with help from a green roof that follows the natural topography surrounding the residence. Located in a protected countryside near Oslo Fjord, Villa Aa is a residence built to adapt to changing land regulations so future generations can still the countryside home.

Designed to be an office as well as a home, Villa Aa’s interior rooms seamlessly transition between garden courtyards and office areas, informal and formal living spaces. Looking at Villa Aa from its rear exterior deck, entire glass facades are created with sliding glass doors that dissolve the barrier between the outdoors and interior spaces. From there, residents enjoy unfettered views of Oslo Fjord, connecting the home to its larger environment.

Also facing the home’s outdoor spaces, a formal living room, kitchen, and three main bedrooms are blended into the villa’s layout. Then, an office space, a family living room, bathrooms, and smaller reception areas make up the other end of the home. Throughout the residence, rooms sharing the same axis feature overhead skylights that merge with Villa Aa’s green roof.

Acting as the home’s upper terrace, the green roof artfully conceals the home’s concrete facades, which trace the entirety of the home’s rear, outdoor spaces. The concrete merges with steel columns and girders that stand in contrast to the home’s warmer, rustic interior made from varnished and smoked cedarwood. Used for the villa’s walls, floors, terraces, stairwells, and exterior steps, concrete gives rise to the backyard’s pool area that merges with the interior concrete flooring.

The villa’s exterior concrete living spaces blend seamlessly into the interior’s concrete flooring. 

Villa Aa’s green roof conceals the home from a distance. 

From the exterior deck, residents can enjoy unfettered views of the Oslo Fjord. 

The post A green roof helps this villa in Norway to blend in with the surrounding countryside first appeared on Yanko Design.

A staggered green roof gives this educational building organic architecture with sustainable building practices!

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Envisioned in Indore, India by Sanjay Puri Architects, Prestige University is a mixed-use educational building that combines sustainable building practices with organic architecture.

With plans for a 100-acre university campus in the works, Sanjay Puri Architects completed the designs for the campus’s prospective administrative buildings. Located in Indore, India, Prestige University blends organic architecture with sustainable building practices to take full advantage of the environment’s natural resources and climate. Defined by staggered green terraces that gradually ascend towards a 20-meter high apex, Prestige University strikes a balance between interior function and outdoor comfort.

Inspired by traditional Indian architecture, Sanjay Puri Architects first looked to Indore’s natural climate and local resources to build energy-efficient and sustainable infrastructure. Coming from the cavities formed by the top-level green terraces, fractured sunlight and plenty of ventilation pour in through the second-floor ceiling of Prestige University, where the bulk of classrooms are located.

With plenty of access to natural lighting and ventilation, Prestige University found heat mitigation through the site’s 20-meter tall brick screen that works to absorb most of the light and heat that pours down from the sun on the buildings east, west, and south sides. On the exterior level, Sanjay Puri Architects envisioned recreational activities taking place on the multi-tiered green terraces.

Designed to be a mixed-use building, Prestige University will house a library, cafeteria, and multiple seminar halls, amongst other facilities just beneath the rows of green terraces. On the structure’s ground level, students and faculty can find a cafeteria, auditorium, and various administrative offices. Then, in a similar fashion to colosseums’ underground tunnels, Prestige University’s first-floor library rooms are connected by an internal bridge that crosses over the diagonal indoor street.

Designer: Sanjay Puri Architects

Natural sunlight pours in through the cavities made by the multi-tiered green terraces. 

Ground-level courtyards provide a green oasis for eateries and seminar halls. 

The post A staggered green roof gives this educational building organic architecture with sustainable building practices! first appeared on Yanko Design.

This floating treehouse perched on steel stilts was inspired by the family’s young daughter’s sketch!

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Designed by a couple’s daughter, the Tree House was built by Ryan Street Architecture Studio to provide a fun and rugged, forested escape from the family’s main residence.

The imagination of children never ceases to inspire. Brimming with daydreams, children are constantly drawing up sketches and coming up with zany ideas. Inspired by the drawings of their own daughter, an Austin-based couple turned to Ryan Street Architecture Studio for help building a treehouse in their backyard. Primarily designed to be a backyard play space for their two daughters, the couple decided to turn the treehouse into something much larger.

Perched atop a system of stilts that mimic clusters of tree branches, the Tree House almost appears like it’s floating above the clearing below. Transforming the floor plans from a children’s treehouse into a much more refined, spacious, and functional guesthouse manifested through the Tree House’s dizzying exterior details.

Paneled with incongruent, uneven wooden slats, the Douglas fir timber chosen for the Tree House’s exterior facades closely resembles the wooden panels that line the couple’s main residence, stationed only a couple meters in front of the Tree House. Having worked on the couple’s main residence, Ryan Street’s choice for the Tree House to mimic the main residence seemed natural.

As project manager Jeremy Ristau notes, “We wanted the Tree House to feel special, while also keeping it relatable in color palette and materials to their main residence since they are in close proximity and it will ultimately feel like one cohesive estate.”

While the sketch became the Tree House’s main and primary source for inspiration, Ryan Street Architecture Studio promptly turned its gaze to the Tree House’s surroundings to better embody the sketches. Punctuated with mirror panels throughout, the Tree House literally reflects its surroundings.

Giving the illusion that trees and brush are closer than they may appear, the mirrors root the Tree House firmly in its natural surroundings. Even the underbelly of the Tree House is anchored with a large mirror to really send home the Tree House’s floating look.

Taking only around five days to reach its final form, Ryan Street asked the Escobedo Group, a local construction company, to develop a panelized prefabricated system called Dario. Constructed offsite, the panels were transported from the Escobedo Group’s factory to the Tree House, avoiding excess waste and streamlining the home’s assembly process.

Equipped with plumbing and electricity rooted in the home’s steel stilt supports, while the exterior might appear ruggedly refined, the interior is as comfortable as any hotel. With a single bedroom located on the home’s first floor and a loft bedroom with two beds, the Tree House functions as a getaway for the family of four and a whimsical house for guests.

Designers: Ryan Street Architecture Studio & Escobedo Group

The post This floating treehouse perched on steel stilts was inspired by the family’s young daughter’s sketch! first appeared on Yanko Design.

This cliffside villa built in harmony with nature brings out the coastal mountain’s environmental beauty!

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Villa La Grintosa is an elemental residence located in the coastal city of Porto Servo, Sardinia atop a rocky massif that helped to define the home’s floor plan and harmonious layout.

Homes built in harmony with their surrounding landscapes tend to produce havens of elemental architecture. Whether the home’s layout weaves through clusters of pine trees or the rocky edge of a coastal mountainside, the challenge of letting nature decide a home’s structure is always worthwhile.

In Sardinia’s Porto Cervo, Stera Architectures, an architecture agency based in Paris, designed Villa La Grintosa, an all-season residence built to harmonize with the rocky massif it stands on.

The seaside community of Porto Cervo is no stranger to cliffside homes. With dozens of homes puncturing both sides of the mountains that give rise to the port city, Stera Architectures was in the right place when planning Villa La Grintosa.

The team of designers behind La Grintosa went into the project knowing that altering the preexisting landscape wasn’t an option. Taking it one step further, in building La Grintosa, Stera Architectures hopes to enliven the rocky massif where the home is situated.

Noting the harmony of the planning and design process, the team at Stera Architectures describes La Grintosa as an “architectural walk in harmony and continuity with nature where different universes meet and intersect.” Arranged around a central courtyard, La Grintosa’s orientation splits into two different axes–one that faces the sea and one that faces the mountain’s massif.

Arranged on two platforms, the points where these two axes meet become intersections of the home’s main living spaces. Paying credence to the home’s “architectural walk,” Stera Architectures incorporated exterior walking ramps that form a true endless loop through the home, connecting the living room on the eastern facade with the home’s lowest point.

Open-air rooms, Azulejo ceramic work, as well as the home’s uniform exterior cladding made from granite and crushed lava stone paste all work together to send home the infinite loop that Stera Architectures set out to etch into La Grintosa’s elemental layout.

Designer: Stera Architectures

The Azulejo tilework accents bring out the blue hues of the sky and coastal views. 

Open-air rooms flow between outside and interior spaces throughout the home’s floor plan. 

Curved archways meet straight-edge functional elements for a dynamic and harmonious touch. 

Outside, the taupe and gray color schemes merge with the natural rocks that surround the home.

The home’s ever-changing facade mimics the unpredictable terrain of rocky massifs. 

Outside, gray elements drape the home in an elusive guise, while the home’s white stone walls brighten the interior. 

This whimsical home designed by Arthur Dyson is an organic structure built to celebrate nature!

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Located in Sanger, California, The Creek House is a home residence built by Arthur Dyson who used the philosophy of organic architecture to guide the home’s design and construction.

Walking through California will introduce you to some whimsical architecture. Perhaps the most visually mythical and storybook-like, organic architecture is a philosophy of architecture that harmonizes human habitation with the natural world.

Widely considered an adamant proponent of organic architecture, award-winning architect Arthur Dyson designed and constructed The Creek House, one of his organic residential staples. Located on Collins Creek, a tributary of the Kings River in Sanger, California, The Creek House is a home residence built in the philosophy of organic architecture that seamlessly merges into its forested surroundings.

Settled on six acres of land, The Creek House nestles into forested thickets near the base of the Sierras and Sequoia National Park, an ideal location for an organic architectural residence. The Creek House was designed in celebration of nature and its visual connection to the natural world is abundantly apparent.

Looking at the house head-on, its rustic, undulating facade formed out of what appears to be wooden shingles follows the irregular, sinuous curve found in tree rings. Even the topmost wooden panel that keeps a yellowish hue embodies the outermost perimeter of a felled tree trunk.

From the side of the house, its facades resemble the shape of a halved tree trunk, with wooden shingles continuing from the front facade to the home’s roof. The rear deck maintains the home’s completely wooden profile, dissolving an outdoor leisure area into the surrounding brushwood, ​​honeysuckles, cottonwoods, and sycamores.

While the outside of The Creek House finds natural warmth with an entirely wooden frame, the interior burgeons with natural sunlight that pours in through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Mixing natural wooden art deco accents with ’90s interior design elements, The Creek House is the kind of cozy you have to experience for yourself.

Designer: Arthur Dyson

Elements of interior design from the 1990s fill out the inside of The Creek House.

An indoor vista terrace opens up the divide between an upstairs bedroom and the downstairs living room.

Amidst white walls and glass windows, wooden art deco accents give the home some personality. 

Geometric angles and lines bring some harmony to each room of The Creek House.

This Japanese-inspired residence features a multi-tiered, sloping roof that mimics the gentle curve of fallen leaves!

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Four Leaves Villa designed by Kentaro Ishida Architects Studio (KIAS) is a form of organic architecture with a gently twisted, multi-tiered roof that mimics the sloping curve of fallen leaves and a central garden courtyard, the home’s concealed centerpiece.

150 kilometers from the buzzing city streets of Tokyo, Japan, a forested plot of land in Karuizawa, Nagano prefecture of Japan, is home to a weekend retreat designed to mirror the fallen leaves that surround it. Dubbed Four Leaves Villa, the privately-owned residence is a form of organic architecture with a split-level roof designed by Kentaro Ishida Architects Studio (KIAS) that mimics the undulating, overlapping pattern of fallen leaves.

Organic architecture is a philosophy of architecture with a primary goal of harmonizing human habitation with nature. Following the philosophy of organic architecture, the varying orientations of Four Leaves Villa’s living and dining spaces were specifically chosen with consideration to the use of each space and the amount of natural sunlight that might benefit each room’s function.

The living and dining areas face southeast to collect pools of natural sunlight, brightening each room during the day for meals and social gatherings. Then, the bedrooms are posed west to catch views of the forest’s dense brushwood that provides a sense of privacy during the day and coziness at night.

The gently twisted roofs also provide plenty of overhangs to brace guests against the blaze of sun rays. The constructional combination of a concave and convex roof makes for a dynamic interior volume. Where the roof inclines outside, the interior ceiling, lined with exposed wooden beams, reaches lofty heights.

Describing the roof in their own words, KIAS notes, “Every roof has been designed as a Ruled Surface in which straight Laminated Veneer Lumber joists are arranged continuously to form an organic geometry. A series of wooden joists are exposed on the ceiling highlighting the dynamic spatial characters of each living space.”

The interior living, dining, and sleeping spaces are split between three interconnected structural volumes placed on site amongst a preexisting lot of trees. From above, the open-air garden courtyard functions as the home’s centerpiece and the point where the three structural volumes meet, offering an outdoor leisure area where the home’s guests can come together and spend time in nature.

Designer: Kentaro Ishida Architects Studio (KIAS)

Four Leaves Villa’s floor plan reveals the three structural volumes without their roofs and the garden courtyard that functions as their centerpiece.