Architects: bioi – Jordan Allen / Ryan Trefz
Completion date: 2012
Project Area: 69.5 sqm
Visualizations: Matúš Nedecký
Photography: Alison Andersen & bioi
Location: Warburg, Alberta, Canada
bioi has shared with ILikeArchitecture their Warburg House project, located in Alberta, Canada.
Seeking to architecturally balance the functional, the handsome, the efficient, and the economical is not an easy task; but this was the brief provided for the Warburg House. The question posed by the client was simple: can Canadian architecture studio bioi provide a simple, contemporary, and energy efficient home for less than $100,000?
On a wooded Canadian farmstead, the new house replaces a dwelling that was no longer able to fulfill its function due to build quality and the strains of a working farm. The architectural concept was simple: open, flexible, and efficient.
As an extrusion of an iconic “house-shaped” form, the new house floats 200mm off of the ground. Positioned along a large clearing to the south of the farmyard, the new house opens itself to the southern sun and completes the enclosure of a small meadow to the east.
With an architectural logic of simple elegance, pain-staking efforts were made to preserve the purity of the house’s iconic form. Supported by two steel frames, the simple form creates a singular interior volume. The exterior skin is draped in black corrugated steel sheets long enough to extend the full length of the house. Both the east and west end-walls are punched into the form to create an announcement of entry and provide a small weather break for the entry doors on either side. The opposed entrances offer morning and evening natural light as well as passive cooling in the summer months.
The western façade is a more public stage for the activities of a day-to-day farm life offering vantage points to the extent of the farmyard and is accompanied by a century old log cabin, relocated from within the site as exterior storage. To the east a smaller and more intimate deck protrudes into a small meadow, allowing for a quiet retreat from the demands of the farm. An abstracted pattern relating to regional tree growth is applied to the cedar decking, which continues vertically up the end walls, contrasting the dark exterior form.
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