case history: the tropical home

case history: the tropical home

A friend called from Hawai'i to ask if we knew any architects who could design a house for his new coffee plantation.  We suggested he hire us for the job, and flew out to take a look at his site.  It was early autumn in Boston, the heat and humidity gone, a trip to Hawai'i just the thing to prolong summer.

The flight to the Big Island of Hawai'i was long, first to Los Angeles and then over an ocean as rippled and green grey as slate.  The sun sank away, reading was futile, and the movie was boring: emerging finally from the plane felt like crawling out of an underground hole.  It was warm and dark and moist in Kona, and the lei offered in welcome smelled absolutely delicious.

The next morning, this more or less is what we saw of the site.  

The client insisted there was a fantastic view there, of miles of coastline and an ocean all the way to Japan.

Here's something that turned out to be the most important thing our client showed us: a closet that didn't get any fresh air:

Without excellent ventilation, the moisture here settles everywhere, and the black mold rapidly follows.  The lesson is simple: the free flow of air is absolutely imperative in this place.  It started us thinking about flow.

In Hawai'i, the ground, the air, the water...it all flows.  It's neither theoretical nor dull enough to ignore.  It is visceral, and commonplace and it makes the experience of being there more vibrant than elsewhere.  It is exactly what makes this place...this place: its genius loci.  We determined that this house, to be truly and fully of this place, it would be about flow.

In thinking about flow, we realized the flow of air and water and lava was really either mauka: up the hill, or makai: towards the ocean.  Obvious perhaps, but out of this thought came the image of an array of parallel walls perpendicular to the slope, a configuration least disruptive of the flow.  These parallel walls could hold up the roof and provide separation between spaces, but never create the moldy closet we saw when we first arrived in Kona.

There are lots of examples of parallel wall buildings, but the one that inspired us here is the Sonsbeek Pavilion designed in 1966 by the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck and rebuilt in 2006 (It was a temporary sculpture exhibit).

We love the way the parallel walls grapple with roundness, and the way views and spatial relationships are enriched with unexpected openings.

This image from the original structure beautifully highlights the contrast between the dark sculptures and the light walls, the heavy concrete block and the light roof structure, sun and shade.  In the same way straight slots of space become round apses, the play of opposites makes a rich architectural experience.  Here is the rebuilt structure:

We worked through the Fall and Winter on the house, The idea of parallel walls came early, but a convincing building eluded us.  Another client needed our help in New York City, and in some little cafe in the Village came the idea to break the Hawai'i house into 6 pieces: Master Bedroom, Office, Living Room, Kitchen/Dining Room, Guest Bedrooms and Garage,  Open Lanais could occupy the spaces between these elements under a great big green copper roof.

The Van Eyck building niggled at us, his way of mashing round and straight in particular suggesting to us that straight walls alone would lack even the slightest possibility of spatial tension.  A crude sketch of the Hawai'i plan, great big red magic marker ellipses highlighting what we started calling "hot spots", fireplace, kitchen, master bedroom, suggested some possibilities.  The ellipses ultimately erupted out of the roof, great big skylights implying space below without rippling the walls.

In early Spring we flew back to Hawai'i, a month lost to quibbles with the client about the kitchen/dining room.  It seemed the only way to bust through the impasse.  For a week we sketched options, the client reviewing them every evening, until finally a front kitchen with a huge surf board of an island and a back kitchen with dishwashing and storage solved the problem.  A huge snowstorm in Boston kept us in Hawai'i an extra day, and we could celebrate a problem solved.

We sent a model off to Hawai'i, a big chipboard affair.  The response was positive.  We changed our mind about the garage, begging to amputate it from the house and shove it into the slope behind the house.  We spent more time than we were paid for.  Our plan for Hula Dog Farm developed into this:

The pools of water flow through the house, clouds can drift through, and the lava rock and plants flow into the dwelling as well.  Views out into the landscape in all directions ties you directly, viscerally to the landscape.  A section through the building shows this as well:

We thought a lot about air flow and cooling, accounting for evaporation and the bernoulli principle and every other strategy we could think of that might keep air moving in the building:

...and when we were done, and the building we designed was built, and the owner called to say that clouds were drifting through his house, we could email him this picture torn out of a travel magazine on the plane flight home from our first site visit, before we really knew what we were going to do:

A few years later, after the house was "discovered", a photographer asked to document the house, and it came to anchor a book called "The Hawai'ian House Now".  It's available through Amazon.

There are parts of this story less triumphant: how the client lived in a shipping container for two years on the site to get this thing built, how it took him a year to find a contractor to build it for the money he could borrow, how we almost lost the skylights and the beautiful pool to the pressure to reduce cost, how the contractors that finally started despite skills and endurance failed to finish and lost their own houses to the bonding company, their bid price too low, how the soils on the site gave way in the rains one night.  These were all emergencies then but feel like footnotes now.

The original owner still lives there, and just this year we designed some support buildings to help him more effectively operate the coffee plantation.  See our portfolio for photographs of the house.