The Cliffhouses

Rethinking the future of housing

How do you design for a non-sedentary generation, that is looking to redefine the meaning of “settling down”?

After selecting two iconic works of architecture in the realm of the human habitat, there was a search for the underlying roots that attest to the permanence of architectural principles. These two examples, a contemporary Japanese house -House H, Sou Fujimoto- and an ancient complex of cliff excavations in Cappadocia, Turkey, looked deceptively different at first glance.

After being analyzed, measured and documented, a series of fundamental principles began to arise from both structures. Besides space distribution being fairly similar in terms of privacy and access, there is a deeper concept that I carried through to my own design later on. Both spaces rely on the idea of creation by removal. There’s a literal and a conceptual approach to this idea of carving space. Cappadocia does this in a very literal manner, and this also dictates the level of privacy of the rooms inside the rock.

In House H, Fujimoto started with a very rigid geometry which he began to punch holes through, and with the help of a system of stairs he managed to create an incredibly well connected space despite its verticality and narrowness.

Going from this, I began to look at this idea of “connection” and how spaces could bleed or overlap on one another to create a new species of spaces, which you could call the “space squared” moments in the system. I developed this idea both in plan and sectionally simultaneously. In the end, I realized that to create these spaces I needed to restrict the shifting of the system to one axis, in order to be able to grow vertically, and explore the overlapping of the spaces breaking free of the plan.