Tag Archives: parametric design

A Gaming Executive Said “Build Me a Crystal House.” This Is What 7,300 sq. ft. of Pure Glass Looks Like

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Glass is the most psychologically loaded material in architecture. It promises transparency and delivers ambiguity, reads as weightless while demanding extraordinary structural engineering, and has the strange property of making a building simultaneously present and absent depending on where you stand and what the light is doing. Architects have been exploiting these contradictions since Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in 1851, and the conversation has never really stopped. F-House, a private residence on Lake Washington in Kirkland, Washington, designed by Goble Berriman Design with facade specialist Pulp Studio, pushes that conversation to a place most residential architects would consider genuinely unreasonable.

The brief, issued by a client working in the computer gaming industry, was a single directive: build a crystal house. What followed was years of design development, engineering collaboration, and custom fabrication to produce a home with zero conventional exterior cladding. Every surface is glass, cut into angular, irregular panels that assemble into a faceted form inspired by shattered ice erupting through terrain. The steel structure supporting all of it is hidden. The fixings are concealed. Even drainage details disappear behind custom direct-to-glass printed borders, because Goble Berriman understood that one visible downspout would break the entire illusion.

Designer: Goble Berriman Design & Pulp Studio

The pedigree behind this project deserves context. Stuart Berriman spent years at The Jerde Partnership working on large-scale mixed-use developments across Asia before co-founding Goble Berriman. Partner Angus Goble was a founding member of Front Inc., a leading facade consultancy whose client list included Frank Gehry, OMA, Herzog and de Meuron, and SANAA. That lineage matters here, because F-House reads less like an ambitious residential project and more like a commercial-grade facade engineering exercise that happens to contain bedrooms. The crystalline exterior geometry, which shifts from mirror-flat reflectivity to deep angular shadow depending on the hour, is the kind of work you expect from firms operating at institutional scale, not on a private lakeside lot in Kirkland.

The home spans 7,300 square feet and sits surrounded by natural rock formations and dense Pacific Northwest greenery, with Mount Rainier visible across the water. That landscape pairing is doing real compositional work. The hard, faceted glass skin reads against the softness of the firs and boulders as a deliberate counterpoint, the same logic that makes mineral specimens so visually arresting when you set them against organic matter. The building doesn’t try to blend into its site. It announces itself as something foreign to the natural order, which, given the crystal brief, is precisely correct.

The thermal and privacy engineering required to make a fully glazed house actually livable is where the project earns its most serious design credibility. Double silver-coated glass handles the main residence, while solar-protected glass was selected for the winter garden. Low-emissivity coatings regulate temperature across the envelope, and custom dot-pattern shading improves energy performance without introducing visible blinds or screens that would compromise the exterior reading. Each glass unit is a layered assembly with an air gap and Saflex interlayers that can shift from clear to opaque, giving occupants control over privacy without resorting to curtains. Insulated spandrel panels handle transitions where solid construction was unavoidable. The result is a house that performs like a thermally responsible building while looking like it was assembled from a single continuous material.

The interior layout is organized around a winter garden that acts as a central divider, separating the main residence from the studio and garage, the latter featuring a glazed hangar door. A continuous skylight stretches from the entry through to the dining area and garden terraces, and a glass bridge connects to the master bedroom, turning what would ordinarily be a corridor into a suspended, luminous passage. Goble Berriman ran the entire project through a shared 3D model across every consultant and contractor, and the homeowner navigated the design in VR goggles long before construction began. By the time the building was finished, it felt entirely familiar to the client, confirmation that years of immersive pre-visualization had done their job in a way that no flat drawing ever could.

F-House sits in a tradition of glass architecture that runs from Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House through Philip Johnson’s New Canaan Glass House and into the parametric facade work of the last two decades. What separates it from most of that lineage is the refusal of orthogonal geometry. There are no flat planes meeting at right angles here, no clean curtain wall logic. Every panel is its own negotiated shape, and the whole facade behaves more like a cut gemstone than a building skin. Whether that reads as the most literal client brief ever executed, or as a genuinely new formal proposition for residential glass architecture, probably depends on where you’re standing and what the light is doing. On the shores of Lake Washington with Mount Rainier in the background, I’d argue it’s both.

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This 690 Sq.Ft. Bus Station Cuts Carbon Emissions by 70% Using Recycled Steel

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Waiting for a bus shouldn’t feel like purgatory, but in the intense heat and frequent downpours of Brazil’s Amazon region, it often does. Fernando Andrade understood this intimately when he began designing the Amazon Bus Station in Belém, a project born not from architectural ego but from genuine public consultation with the people who would actually use it. They asked for four things: protection from the weather, environmental comfort, durability, and reasonable cost. What they got exceeded every expectation: a soaring, sculptural shelter that treats public transit users as deserving of the same design attention typically reserved for museums and corporate headquarters.

The 16-meter structure, completed in February 2024, wraps passengers in a protective envelope of triangulated steel and reflective glass, its organic curves creating an embracing interior space that feels both sheltering and expansive. Yellow accessibility ramps guide users through a barrier-free environment where natural ventilation, achieved through traditional Amazonian roof fins, keeps air moving without mechanical systems. Shadows from the geometric framework dance across metal benches as daylight filters through the glass skin, creating an ever-changing interior atmosphere that connects occupants to the rhythms of weather and time. The design accommodates everyone, including those with mobility challenges, while pushing what architectural beauty can achieve in public infrastructure.

Designer:

The structural approach here is basically what happens when parametric design actually solves problems instead of just generating Instagram bait. The whole thing is built from 600mm triangular modules, each assembled from 75x3mm quadrangular steel tubes. That triangulation distributes loads efficiently enough that the entire 16-meter span rests on just four support points, which means minimal ground disruption and maximum flexibility for street-level circulation. And they used recycled steel throughout, dropping carbon emissions by 70% compared to conventional construction methods. The numbers matter because this approach could scale. Belém gets this one station, but the fabrication methodology, the material choices, the whole industrial-to-site assembly process translates to other locations dealing with similar climate challenges and budget constraints.

The 8mm laminated glass blocks 99.8% of direct solar radiation, which in equatorial conditions isn’t a nice-to-have feature, it’s the difference between a functional space and a greenhouse. But the clever bit is those ventilation fins at the roof ridge. They’re angled glass louvers that let hot air escape while keeping rain out, basically a stack effect ventilator with zero moving parts and zero maintenance requirements beyond occasional cleaning. No motors failing, no electronics corroding in humidity, no ongoing energy costs. Just heated air rising and escaping through geometry that works with local wind patterns. It’s the kind of solution that feels obvious in hindsight but requires serious environmental modeling to get right.

Nine months from concept to completion, with fabrication happening in a controlled industrial environment using local shipbuilders who know how to work with complex curves and weather-resistant assemblies. They pre-built the structure in three major sections, transported them to site, and only finished the connection joints on location. That level of prefabrication ensures tolerances stay tight and quality control doesn’t depend on field conditions, which matters when you’re dealing with structural silicone joints and precise glass panel alignments. The client, Centro Integrado de Inclusão e Reabilitação, specializes in accessibility infrastructure, so the barrier-free circulation wasn’t an afterthought added to satisfy code. It shaped the entire spatial concept from the beginning.

The real test of any transit infrastructure is whether it changes behavior. A better bus station doesn’t just shelter existing riders, it potentially converts people who currently drive because the bus experience feels too degrading or uncomfortable. Belém’s new station won’t single-handedly transform modal split numbers, but it signals that public transit users deserve environments worth occupying. These details accumulate into an experience that respects users enough to think through their actual needs rather than just checking regulatory boxes. That respect, rendered in recycled steel and high-performance glass, might be the most radical thing about the whole project.

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This Bridge-Shaped House Hangs Weightlessly Between Two Forested Hillsides

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Amid the dense, monsoon-fed vegetation of Karjat, India, The Bridge House by Wallmakers, under the direction of architect Vinu Daniel, appears as if it were woven into the landscape itself. A natural stream has carved a seven-meter-deep gorge through the terrain, splitting the land into two disconnected parcels. What could have been a limitation became the defining opportunity to create a dwelling that does not conquer the landscape but hovers above it, merging architecture with the act of crossing.

Rather than filling the void, Wallmakers chose to span it, crafting an occupiable bridge that physically and symbolically unites the site. Since no foundations could be placed within the 100-foot spillway, the design evolved into a suspended home anchored delicately by only four footings on either side of the gorge. The result is a structure that appears to levitate, a line of lightness drawn between two fragments of land.

Designer: Wallmakers

Necessity became invention. The form of The Bridge House emerged from the challenge of building across a natural divide without disturbing it. Conceived as a 100-foot-long suspension bridge, the home is composed of four hyperbolic parabolas, mathematical forms that achieve strength through geometric efficiency. Steel tendons and pipes provide tensile stability, while a thatch-and-mud composite forms the compressive shell.

This combination, simultaneously ancient and modern, generates a dialogue between tension and compression, precision and softness. The house becomes both structure and skin, taut like a bowstring yet flexible enough to adapt to the living landscape.

True to Wallmakers’ ethos of contextual minimalism, the house sits lightly upon its site. The thatched surface, arranged in overlapping scales reminiscent of a pangolin’s skin, blends seamlessly with the forest canopy. Beyond aesthetics, this cladding provides thermal insulation, maintaining cool interiors amid Karjat’s humid climate.

The decision to use only four anchoring points ensures that the gorge and its contours remain untouched. The house becomes a visitor, not an intruder, in the ecosystem it occupies.

Every material used in The Bridge House carries intention. The mud plaster coating that envelops the thatch serves as both armor and adhesive: it prevents pests from entering, enhances compressive strength, and eliminates the need for vertical pillars. In doing so, it underscores the project’s central belief that material intelligence can achieve structural innovation without technological excess.

Inside, the design continues its conversation with nature. At the core of the house lies an oculus, an open circle framing the sky. During rainfall, water filters through this void into a central courtyard, transforming the climate into a sensory event. The interplay of light, water, and air activates the interior, making the house respond to every passing hour.

The interiors are minimal yet warm, defined by reclaimed ship-deck wood, jute, and woven mesh screens that modulate light and airflow. Four bedrooms open outward, some toward the treetops, others overlooking the stream, creating a rhythmic dialogue between enclosure and exposure. The transitions are seamless: the line between “inside” and “outside” dissolves into filtered light and moving shadows.

In The Bridge House, Wallmakers once again demonstrate their mastery of building with the land, not on it. The project stands as an exploration of local materials, structural logic, and ecological sensitivity, a philosophy that defines Vinu Daniel’s work across India.

Suspended above the gorge yet rooted in its context, The Bridge House does more than connect two parcels of land. It connects technology with tactility, structure with story, and human presence with the pulse of nature. In doing so, it reimagines architecture not as a static object, but as a living, breathing bridge between worlds.

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