I'm constantly checking the time.
Sometimes for no real reason at all.
And I think it's because I usually feel like I don't have enough time.
And I guess this is my attempt to control it.
But this little habit has turned me
into someone that I don't really like.
So when I started
working with my first client, who basically gave me
unlimited design freedom, I knew I wanted to explore this idea of time
and is there any way to slow it down?
This video is sponsored
by SketchUp and Morpholio.
This feeling of being rushed.
It's a universal feeling, especially in the digital age.
But if you think about it, it's actually kind of ironic.
All of these tools are designed to increase efficiency
so that we can have more time and improve the quality of our lives.
But instead we're all just pushing for more, more productivity,
more experiences, more excitement, more things to see, more things to do.
F.O.M.O. (FEAR OF MISSING OUT)
But leisure in itself has become a multi million dollar industry
that tries to keep us constantly entertained, constantly wanting
more, and again making us feel like we don't have enough time
There's a few moments in my life
where I felt the sensation of being unplugged from the world.
There's a quality about these moments that makes me want to slow down my pace,
willing myself to be lost and to be alone.
So when I started designing the Orinda house (San Francisco, CA)
I tried to let these memories guide the design.
In some ways, I think this is kind of the perfect site.
You come here to disconnect from the rest of the world at the same time.
The site does come with a few challenges.
Feels a little bit steeper than I thought
it was going to be.
So as you can see, the hill is extremely steep.
It's got almost a 30 degree slope and it's facing north.
So the hours of
daylight is actually quite limited because it's blocked by this hill.
In fact, when we did a proper Sun study, the only part of the site that got
lots of daylight throughout the day is at the top of the hill right here.
There's also like a million protected trees on the site.
Basically, anything over a six inch diameter is a protected tree.
So I had to pick a spot that would require the least amount of tree cutting.
We also have this 25 foot height limit.
So the lower we go down the site, the shallower
we have to make the floor plate.
Otherwise, we have to corner to the hill, which based on our Geotech report,
it will be possible, but it will be a challenge
because the bedrock is very hard.
So this flat portion right here
seemed like the ideal location for the building.
You get tons of daylight.
There's not a ton of trees around.
And with our concept of maximizing time, this location seemed like a no brainer.
But the problem
was, how do we get all the way up here?
How do we get materials up here?
Building a driveway will be very expensive,
and we'd have to cut down a lot of trees.
And the city of Orinda would not be happy.
The solution actually came from an acquaintance.
Apparently, these little hillside lifts are quite common in California
because there's so many steep sites like this.
So the driveway and the garage,
they can stay right here at the bottom of the hill.
And so you park your car right here and you take your little hillside elevator
and that's how
you get to the house as you slowly move up the lift.
You sit.
You look at the trees and you can also
see glimpses of the building when you finally reach the top.
All you have is a platform and a massive concrete wall on the side.
And when you touch the wall,
you're totally surprised to find that it's warm and soft.
In the summer of 2016, we traveled across Europe
to look at architecture at the last leg of our trip.
We made our way to this little Swiss village
called Head in State to visit the home and studio.
Peter Zumthor, who happens to be one of my favorite architects, nobody was there.
So technically I guess we weren't actually visiting.
But regardless, the building was designed by Peter Zumthor himself.
So I took like a million pictures.
I peeked through the windows and I touched everything I could get my hands on.
Don't ask why.
It was just before we were about to leave.
As I was trying to get my last few pictures,
I found a nice old window recessed into a perfectly formed concrete.
But something was different when I touched it.
I was shocked.
The concrete was soft and warm.
This hard material had the texture of fabric.
I think the concrete must have been formed using fabric
as a formwork, and it conducted heat from the sunlight.
The only proof that I have of this is this photo,
which doesn't even come close
to capturing this feeling.
But sometimes when I touch a soft linen, maybe one that's been sitting out
in the sun for a long time, it reminds me of this moment.
The problem is that
vision is the loudest of our senses,
and so by limiting our view of the house, we start to pay
a little bit more attention to our other senses.
You could hear the water in the distance, and when you touch the wall,
you're surprised to feel the strange texture under your fingertips.
You notice your movements, the variation in the wall,
and maybe you start to slow down.
Once you turn the corner, you enter into a garden.
And it's not just a garden, it's a labyrinth.
And you have to take this meandering
path in order to reach the entrance of the house.
And I'm sure over time the family would build in shortcuts.
Maybe here and here and here.
But the main road takes you on a long journey.
This very intentional complexity of the path.
It creates a sense of mystery, curiosity.
Each new turn reveals a new moment, a hidden corner,
a carefully framed vehicle, or maybe a really soft moss
here, getting lost and then found.
That's the whole point.
That feeling of being blindly led
by your feet
elaborates, We're
actually used for meditation by priests during the medieval times.
They're non-linear and they can be disorienting,
but knowing that they'll eventually get to the end.
These long walks were used to reach a state of contemplation.
When you reach the end of the garden, you land on a large stepping stone,
which marks the end of the labyrinth and the beginning
of the house.
according to Juhani Pallasmaa, images of water emphasize
architectural permanence and concretize the passing of time.
The reflective surface of the water hides
depth and projects a second hidden world.
The double world activates our imagination for the duality of past and future.
So in order to get this kind
of effect, the water needs to be getting direct sunlight.
The light hits, the water bounces off,
and the refraction from the water as projected
onto this concrete wall.
So after iterating through a couple of different options,
we decided to place the pools at the top of the site.
On the south end one reflecting pool
here and one accessible pool here.
And so we maximize the sunlight
and this refraction of the water becomes a part of the entry experience.
So over here, you can take a moment to pause.
We landscaped this area so that the seeding becomes a part of the hill.
And instead of paving this area with concrete, we continue the stone paths
so that this entire space feels like one continuous garden.
So when you enter the house, you enter into a hall with wood slats
on one side and a personalized concrete wall on the other.
The patterns on the concrete panels create rhythm as you enter.
The entryway is a transitional place, and it's a place of movement.
And it's a place where outside becomes inside.
Is your first few moments into the house
where you leave your keys, your coat,
where you leave your outside self behind and you enter your home.
It's not a moment, but it's an in-between moment.
And these are the moments that usually get forgotten about.
These moments make up only seconds in our days,
but added up they become hours and days.
And so by elevating this experience with the light and texture,
we can make even these transitional moments memorable.
As you
descend the stairs through this narrow transitional space,
you experience expansion
for the first time.
You really see the beautiful view over the hill,
the interconnected spaces of the house,
the reflection of the water on one side.
And for a brief moment you take a pause.
This isn't my typical process for designing, but there was an object
that kept coming to my mind as I was designing the building a sundial.
I think there's something really poetic about it,
how the hands stay still while it
quietly witness the fleeting hours and seasons.
But compared to a digital clock, it's not dictated by the seconds of minutes.
And instead I feel a more gradual
passing of time.
Ha ha ha.
I think about the sun's journey across the sky
and it reminds me of our connection to the universe.
It makes me think about my existence in the context of this vast space and time
as the sun
moves across the sky from morning to evening.
I wanted the building to kind of dance
with the changing angles of the sunlight.
We tried a bunch of iterations of the roof because it changed how the light
stretched into the living room and into the office and into the kitchen.
Maybe this movement can even guide some of the activity in the house.
But there's another moment in the house
where you experience light in a totally different way,
and that will be underneath the pool right here
where we get the refraction through the water,
which is a totally different quality of light.
This room actually drove a lot of the relationships
between the spaces in the house.
I wanted the refraction to be a part of the experience of the house
so that the living room and the kitchen can borrow some of that refraction.
But because of the depth of the pool, it was really hard to do that
without placing the relaxation room on a completely different basement level,
which is why each of the spaces stuck down a half storey.
This creates separate spaces that still feel interconnected
and this works with the natural topography of the site,
which gradually steps down as we move towards the east.
Ha ha.
Time is a human made invention.
We create a time as a framework to get organized
and measure progress and make sense of our lives.
So maybe architecture can slow down
our perception of time.
Maybe it can make us pause and maybe it can make us notice
the moments that usually go unnoticed.
You know, this whole craze about the circadian rhythm,
it's really all about resetting our systems back to the natural state
and realigning them to the movement of the sun.
I think as architects, we often design for the hours and the days in our lives,
but we often forget about the seconds and minutes.
So how do we make these more granular
time intervals more memorable in our lives?
I think those are some of the questions that we're going to try to answer
as we progress the design.
We're still in the schematic design phase, so things are still really conceptual
and there's still a lot of things to figure out.
And in fact, since making this video,
the design has actually changed quite a bit.
And because our business is not just architecture,
it does take a little bit longer for us to do things.
So please be patient with the project updates.
But that's also one of the best parts for me that we can explore
some of these concepts a little bit more in depth.
If you're interested in some of the assets that we're using for the visuals
like some of these watercolor people will leave a link in the description.
Let me know in the comments.
What do you think about the project
and what other concepts do you think we should explore?
And with that, I'll see you guys in the next video.