[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]