Kirsten Dirksen Films (May 28, 2023) – Caspar Schols built his first shapeshifting house in his mother’s backyard as her writing cabin that, by sliding a room-on-rails, could convert into a place to sleep under the stars.
He has since perfected his expandable home with 10 prototypes: his most recent model is robust enough to serve as a primary residence and has a bathtub and guest bed hidden in the floor. The house can be opened up – on sunny days, for nature-watching or just to sleep directly under the stars – with just a push.
The entire walls and ceiling of the house move, but anyone can propel this 3,000 kilograms (over 6000 pounds) room-on-rails because Schols created a system that is “super low friction”. To create a well-insulated home that has walls that move, Schols and his team designed the rails with wind labyrinths to trap the air and added brushes to any moving surface to prevent airflow.
Kirsten Dirksen Films (April 30, 2023) – When we planned a visit to NYC, our friend Hasier Larrea, who makes “furniture with superpowers” offered us a tiny studio filled with his robotic furniture to see how it could expand to fit our family of 5.
On the 54th floor of a skyscraper overlooking downtown Manhattan, the space starts small, but the moving walls expand into an office pod and a walk-in closet and the bed drops from the ceiling to convert the living room into a bedroom. Setting up for the night in an apartment made for two was an experiment. We had single air mattresses and expanding rooms.
Hasier’s colleague at Ori suggested opening the Pocket Closet and Pocket Office to create bedrooms. The closet was a few inches too small, but the office was just the right size. Our 10-year-old claimed the window seat for his bed, with the best view in the house. Hasier told us to test the furniture. He said it wouldn’t break and would stop when it sensed an obstacle. Our 10-year-old spent a lot of time sitting on the bed while his sisters tried to raise it (it wouldn’t) and getting in and underneath moving parts that left him without a scratch.
All the transforming took a few extra minutes, but being able to tuck away the bed without having to make it was a bonus. The whole experience felt a bit nautical with adapt-as-you-need-it furniture and panoramic views.
Julien Cohen’s first home was carved into the side of a hill in La Roque Gageac, a troglodytic village stacked against a sheer cliff. He spent 5 years in this sliver of a home where the stone face is everywhere: as the ceiling of his closet and shower, behind the refrigerator, and in the wall looming over the bed. During the Hundred Year’s War,
La Roque Gageac, was one of the few towns that never fell to the English, thanks to a fort perched on the cliff at the top of town whose only access is a tiny staircase (It still stands). The views from the cliff are panoramic perspectives on the Dordogne River and surrounding castles; this is an area Henry Miller called the “Frenchman’s paradise”. Here, Cohen lived for five years until his growing family made the small space too difficult.
La Roque Gageac is one of France’s most beautiful villages. In a stunning position on the north bank of the Dordogne River, and backed by a steep hill / cliff, with little to suggest that much has changed there in the last 300 years, La Roque-Gageac is truly the perfect picture postcard village. It is about 8km from the historic town of Sarlat.
Olot (Catalonia, Spain, population 34,000), an old town in the midst of the Pyrenees’ foothills, is well known for its forested volcanoes, country estates (“masías”) & evergreen pastures, but when Fina Puigdevall talked to her former classmate Carme Pigem about revamping her restaurant Les Cols plus building her new house, neither of them could have imagined that, later on, the former would become a celebrated Michelin-starred chef, and the latter a Pritzker-prize-awarded architect.
Puigdevall grew up in Les Cols, her family’s 15th century masia. In 1990, in an attempt to save it from development, she opened a restaurant in the former stables downstairs. With no formal culinary training, she worked her way to two Michelin stars by 2010 (which she has held since). In 2000, she hired Pigem and RCR architects to open up the space to the outdoors: they designed a light/water cube in the kitchen and a huge glass wall framing the apple orchard and chicken run.
The result is a dining experience that feels immersed in the outdoors. When Puigdevall wanted to expand her own home – a former mill straddling a creek – to accommodate her husband and three daughters, RCR Architects told her they wouldn’t touch the original structure, but proposed something completely new in the middle of the former corn fields. What they dubbed “Horizon House” is a corten steel structure carved into the hill. Large walls of glass can be opened to allow the fields – now planted with native crops like buckwheat- to enter the home.
In 1979 Asha Deliverance sewed her first geodesic dome on an old Singer sewing machine, finishing it in time to become her eldest child’s first home. Motivated by the work of Buckminster Fuller, she continued to build dome homes for friends until she responded to increasing demand and opened the country’s first retail dome company in 1980.
Today, Asha has stopped sewing and relies on her team at the Pacific Domes headquarters in Ashland, Oregon to fabric weld her domes. The company provides shelters for families, glamping sites, greenhouses, climbing, events (e.g. Coachella) and extreme outposts. “To test some of the possible challenges of living on Mars, NASA joined forces with Pacific Domes in early in 2013 to erect a 44-foot geodesic-engineered dome on the northern slope of Mauna Loa, Hawaii.”
The company offers DIY dome kits starting at $5,500 for a 16 foot (5 meter) shelter that can be erected with their manual in a couple of days (instructions for the deck are included). When we asked Deliverance about the frustrations of some dome builders like Shelter Publications’ Lloyd Kahn she explained that in the ‘60s people were building domes out of wood which required sealing multiple joints, but that using fabric has made all the difference.
In 1938 architect and designer Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) designed a mountain shelter able to withstand the harsh elements of any mountaintop yet still light enough to be carried by hand.
The “Refuge Tonneau” (“barrel shelter”), her piece of nomadic architecture designed with Pierre Jeanneret, consists of just 12 main prefabricated panels light enough to be manually transported. Once on location, the panels lock together to resist wind, snow, and cold. The tiny barrel-shaped structure sleeps up to 10 people and while it was never constructed in Perriand’s lifetime it was just one of her many designs created for the masses.
In 1934, after 7 years working with Le Corbusier, Perriand began a five-year study of minimal shelters, like the prefab aluminum Bivouac refuge and the affordable, elegant prefab “House at the Water’s Edge”. Hoping to improve upon her easily-transportable, aluminum Bivouac shelter she found inspiration in the merry-go-round. Counting on the dodecagon shape’s ability to withstand strong centrifugal loads (and high winds), she made it the basis for her Refuge Tonneau.
All her tiny shelters were works of studied elimination. “Her mission was to eliminate anything unnecessary,” explains her daughter Pernette Perriand-Barsac, “but always to concentrate on the flow of light and air. Then you can live in the smallest of spaces.” Sébastien Cherruet gave us a tour of Perriand’s minimal structures and apartment design at the Louis Vuitton Foundation’s exhibit he curated: “Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World”.
When Tas Careaga first saw his 16th-century church it was advertised for sale as a “land plot with build-in ruins”. Abandoned for decades – the town has 6 other churches for a population of 2000 – it was being sold by the local bishopric for very little, but the new owner was required to rebuild it.
Careaga and friends spent 3 months just clearing the structure of debris before starting work to turn the relic into a home. With help from his architect friend Carlos Garmendia, Careaga preserved the open-feeling of the space by adding only one wall (for a bathroom on the 2nd floor). The cupola now houses a very high-ceilinged kitchen with art gallery walls. Most of the church celebrates the 10-meter (30-foot) ceilings created 5 centuries ago. In about a quarter of the space,
Careaga built a wooden frame to house two open-air floors for a 2nd-floor bedroom and 3rd-floor office. Instead of walls or banisters, the first floor relies on just three thin metal cables for the protection of occupants. The home is deeply personal, filled with furniture from Careaga’s family, religious art from his grandmother, and idiosyncrasies like a slackline to cross the thirty-foot-drop between the office and a secret bedroom above the cupola.
Careaga spent 3 years converting the church to his home with mostly his own labor and help from friends. He continues to add new touches, like converting the bell tower into a reading nook and bunk room for guests.
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