Project Description
FROM THE ARCHITECTS:
Full architectural, interior design, and documentation services. Create a new, modern home unique to the area in design that avoids cliché examples of the local architectural vernacular. Creating a contemporary design that fits within the local environment. Open floor plans with interesting internal elements to define and separate spaces / wings with transparent connectors. Dramatic architecture with interesting shapes and forms make the home visually exciting. Taking advantage of the site’s topography with subtle elevation changes in the floors to other wings that act as bridges. Maximizing the use of the land to take advantage of opportunities within the land planning for outdoor use, such as creating outdoor dining areas, fire pits, and play areas for children. Incorporating water in the design through ponds, streams, and bridges. Glass, as a predominant material, allows for a 360 degree view with as sense of visual connection with the outdoors.
Located on Sunset Ridge overlooking the Deep Creek Canyon, the Sunset Ridge Residence is surrounded by a 360 degree panoramic view of the San Miguel Mountain range in Telluride, Colorado.
The planning concept was developed around an organization layout with independent wings of various sizes, functions, and shapes in a semicircular or radial placement across the site, which attach with transparent bridging connectors. This planning concept affords infinite possibilities for the architectural forms, as well as internal and external programming relationships of the home’s design. The semicircular planning organization has practical benefits by allowing for maximization of the magnificent 360 degree views, particularly in buffering the prevailing winds and provides protection on the inward side of the arc. The placement of the arc compliments the existing topography and focuses on the outward aperture of the arc toward the dramatic southeast scenery to the south side of the site.
The floor elevation gently steps as the house bends around the knoll, which offers varying relationships to the existing grade. This diversity in grade relationship manifests itself in two extreme forms; first by parts of the house having on grade and walk out relationships, and secondly with the dramatic cantilevering overhanging relationships. The architecture of the individual wings are diversely shaped and complementing forms that have very transparent open relationships to the views and outdoor experience.
The home is anchored to the land through the use of ‘geologic forms’ that emerge from the ground, creating platforms for the transparent glassy public spaces of the main level. The geologic forms also make their way vertically up through the home to create enclosed private program elements within the very open space plan. The geologic shapes are interesting for their possibilities in architecture, adding a counterpoint the open glassy areas of the design, and are experienced as if they were created through nature’s forces on the site itself. This design concept is particularly effective with the added notion of water features introduced in the land planning concepts, as well as the sense that an erosive force has played a hand in creation of the design. To intensify this effect on the architectural forms, the design also contemplates interesting varied roof shapes that float on light structural columns throughout the plan.