Inside An Experimental Off-Grid Modern Cabin

[soft instrumental music]

[Steven] We created a manifesto

to study architecture

freed from the purely objective, right.

No bedrooms.

No doors.

From origins of architecture,

we explore in

that is that the interior

is more important than the exterior.

This is what we live in.

[soft instrumental music]

I'm Steven Holl architect,

and we're here at

the Ex of In House in Rhinebeck.

And I'm Dimitra Tsachrelia,

an architect as well

who contributed to the design of this house.

This project started really as research,

a kind of experimental project in our studio.

So we started with Peter Sloterdijk

trilogy about spheres, his three volumes.

We wanted to work with the ideas

that he was working with.

You're born in a sphere, the uterus.

You come out into the sphere of your family.

You inhabited the globe,

and then there's a kind of idea of the foam

of the universe and the political foam

of reality.

What we did was we made a bunch of drawings,

and made models where we had

a trapezoidal volume,

and that it was being intersected by spheres,

and what we were interested in

was the interior,

and we called the project, Explorations of In.

Ex of In.

And that's how this house got its name

because it came out of these models,

and these drawings.

[soft instrumental music]

We worked on the design

longer than it took to build it.

Yeah

[Steven] We began to work it

from the inside out.

And you will notice that this house

has no bedrooms.

Zero bedrooms.

But it sleeps five.

Every space is connected.

One leads you to another.

And as you come into this space,

you realize that the whole thing opens up,

and turns around you

as you walk around it.

[Steven] That's the sunrise sphere intersecting,

and that becomes the entrance way.

This is the sphere overhead,

which cuts the building in this direction.

and this is the Western sphere,

which is a virtual sphere.

[soft instrumental music]

[Dimitra] So this is the entrance of the house.

This sphere that we've just entered in

is facing east.

And you can see that the whole materiality

is out of made out of wood.

And all the details you see are built

in and designed from us

to fit in that concept and in this space.

The space out of this first sphere opens out

into the living room,

into the kind of main space,

and you kind of slightly go down,

and the space opens up

in a kind of generous height.

It's a very small footprint.

It's only 980 square foot,

but because of the kind of volume of space,

you have a more generous experience.

And then the living room

is also built-in.

The space kind of slightly goes down

to form the kitchen area.

Living happens

between those two different planes.

The furniture is mid-century furniture.

Otherwise, it is designed by Steven Holl,

and you can see the materiality,

the stair is crafted out of mahogany.

There is solid good everywhere

that you see the frames of the windows

indoors is custom-made.

Even the carpet, this is Stephen Holl carpet,

the kitchen steps down as it follows

the topography outside,

and the rest of the side stepping down.

And there is a cross breeze coming from

those two doors that open up,

and you see the bottom of the sphere.

You realize you're underneath

that space that opens up,

and looking out to it.

You see the sun in the night,

it brings light down from the space above.

From here, you can open out into the garden,

and you can sit outdoors,

so the inside outside works here beautifully.

The furniture is designed by Steven.

Very simple.

We call this the A chair,

and the kitchen is also all made out of wood.

[soft instrumental music]

Every cut in the space

has to do not only with the natural daylight

that comes in during the day,

but also with the way

the night experience works.

We respect the experience of the darkness,

the subtlety of dimness of the light.

So all of these windows and cuts

towards the interior

become spaces where one room

illuminates the other.

One space brings light into the next.

And it opens up of course into the big sphere

in front of us on the west

that brings the last light of the day in

as the sun sets.

This space faces to the West on the Hudson River.

And you can actually sit here,

and relax and contemplate,

and look out into the forest,

and down into the kitchen.

And that's in kind of connection

space as well.

The light fixtures are actually

part of the concept models

that initiated the design of this house.

This is actually the west cut.

This window is right in here.

So if you invert this sphere

so you get the negative space,

which is the house itself.

So this conceptual model,

we like to explore in all different scale,

and make it part of the experience

of the house.

These light fixtures are printed

out of a corn-based bioplastic

that's a 3D printing material.

[soft instrumental music]

The geometry forms

this kind of cutout that provides

privacy for the bed next to the window

with a natural ventilation.

This piece of the bathtub

was crafted by Javier Gomez our contractor.

So all the details that you see

are handcrafted,

and the whole house is made

like a piece of furniture.

It's made like the interior of a guitar

or a piece of instrument.

And it's crafted with lots of care,

and for every detail.

And here is a very exciting space

as you go up over the sphere

that we entered the house,

and this space is meant to be

a kind of raw space

where you see the structure of this sphere.

You see the ribs that they had to cut

to form the interior

where they shaped the wood

in this kind of curved layers,

and that's also very exciting spot

as you come up,

and you have this nook that's very private.

And then also you can look down

and the entire space opens up,

and kind of big surprise

I think as you really are up against the ceiling,

and the space slopes down

into the open living room

that's really a space of compression,

and decompression and looking out.

[soft instrumental music]

The water is life.

This water pond literally brought life

onto the site as we position it to the south.

And not only does it activate,

and illuminate the interior with water

reflecting through into the interior,

but it also with the Water Lilys

that we brought into this pond,

brought the frogs in and the turtles,

and they are really a beautiful company

to have in this surrounding.

[soft instrumental music]

[Steven] We want it to be

as ecological as possible.

It has closed cell insulation.

This is all natural wood.

No finishes.

No, you know sort of toxic materials at all.

Even the wooden windows

are all solid mahogany cut,

and without any finish on them.

That's a natural pine board floor,

and it has a geothermal heating,

and cooling system,

and that works perfectly in the wintertime.

It can be zero degrees outside.

It's 70 in here with the radiant floor,

and in the summertime,

we're using that same 51 degrees.

That's 300 feet below the surface

of the earth and cooling it.

The water here is natural well water.

We get eight gallons per minute at 300 feet,

and it's pure water.

It's very pure.

So there's no chlorine in it.

And even the facade is weighed out

of a special stucco that's called pour over,

and that was an experimental application.

This material is made out

of 100 recycled glass,

and it's very lightweight and porous.

So the concept of this sphere

that goes into all the different scales

of the kind of human experience

comes down to those tiny little one millimeter.

So no fossil fuels.

Geothermal heating and cooling.

Organic materials

preserve the natural landscape.

30 acres of preservation.

You know I just saw wild fox

the other day running.

A orange wild Fox.

There's a pond with frogs and turtles.

They eat the mosquitoes.

You can have water that comes off of your roof,

collect all your rain water,

but if you make it ecological,

that is turtles and frogs,

you don't have any mosquitoes.

The most important thing is nature.

Preserve what's here,

and I love for the wildlife

to exist around the house.

So when you come and look out the windows,

you'll be you're surrounded by animals,

and the sound of the frogs,

and the turtles passing.

And the way to make this abstract

thinking of the sphere

into a side specific project

is how to orient it

so that the light comes in,

and works within the space

in these different times of the day.

The way this roof is sloping to the south

made a perfect place for the solar panels

to come on and all these different adjustments

that happened once you know,

this is a location.

and the passive aspect

in terms of the energy use,

the way it's isolated and it works

with natural ventilation

has also to do specifically with this location.

[Steven] So this is the future, right?

We're living at a time in a place.

Different places in the world

have different conditions of right now,

and we're lucky to be in the Hudson Valley.

It gets cold, it snows,

but that's part of the excitement.

Big, nice snow you know?

Outside, moonlight reflecting on snow

coming in through these round windows.

Gorgeous.

Absolute silence.

Stars in the sky.

And then autumn,

this is all orange and yellow,

and red out here like new England is.

You know I grew up in Seattle,

and the trees just don't turn.

You know kind of a pale yellow.

Here you get bright orange and red,

and yellow and some green mixed in.

So it's like living in a painting

in fall.

[soft instrumental music]

We've entered a new phase in humanity

where we actually understand

the brain in ways we never understood it before.

There was that old adage

that Winston Churchill said,

First, we shape our buildings,

and then they shape us.

Right?

Well that was 1944.

This now we know is somewhat true.

So in a certain sense,

we passed into a new phase of understanding

the importance of architecture.

Light, space, volume is very important

to human existence to psychology.

There's a kind of winter sickness

where there's not enough light in a space.

But now we also understand the daylight,

and the way the seasonal light works

on your body and your psyche

through your brain

is something that architecture

can contribute to health.

[soft instrumental music]

The first thing we did

is we commissioned the great poet, Robert Kelly,

to write a poem about this property.

And he spent two months

working on this poem

phases of the earth.

Where he says,

So poetry and music make time pass,

and architecture makes space pass

into meaningful form.

No.

I mean architecture makes music stand still.

That's more like it.

Here time turns into space.

That's one of my favorite

moments of that. Yeah.

What is time, what is space?

How can poetry and art

in architecture connect?

How do they connect?

[soft instrumental music]