Architecture Wednesday: Up, Up and Away

What would you build if you had a 55-acre property in the hills above? A place where you have wide-open views of the nearby mountains, a beautiful valley, and the Pacific Ocean with islands in the distance? What would you build?
Originally the site was home to 21 unique structures, made from found objects, created and designed by Tony Duquette. But, in 1995, a fire destroyed all but a few steel “Pagoda”-like structures. The site was then purchased by a woman who co-owns a Mercedes car dealership,who enlisted the firm of David Hertz Architects, Inc., to create a house of curvilinear, or more feminine, shapes. She envisioned a floating curved roof and it soon became apparent that only an airplane wing would do. So, an aged 747 was purchased, dismantled, trucked to the site, and used to create this home in the hills.
The wing structures are positioned to float on top of simple concrete and rammed-earth walls that are cut into the hillsides. The floating roofs are attached to strategic mounting points on the wing where the engines were previously mounted. 
The scale of a 747 aircraft is enormous: over 230 feet long, 195 feet wide and 63 feet tall with 17,000 cubic feet of cargo area alone. That single plane represented a tremendous amount of material for the economical price of less than $50,000 dollars.

After visiting the 747s, and other decommissioned planes, and verifying with the building department that there is nothing that specifically prohibits the use of an airplane wing as a roof, the project began. there was one last, unexpected hurdle: the roof of the house had to be registered with the FAA so pilots flying overhead do not mistake it as a downed aircraft.

The Main Residence uses the two main wings as well as the stabilizers from the tail section as a roof; the art studio is made from a 50-foot long section of the upper fuselage as a roof, while the remaining front portion of the fuselage and upper first class cabin deck create the roof of the Guest House. The lower half of the fuselage--the cargo hold--is now the roof of the Animal Barn. 

A Meditation Pavilion is made from the entire front of the airplane; the cockpit windows form a skylight. Other parts of the plane are used throughout the property, and include a fire pit and water element made from the engine cowling.

The 747 once represented the single largest industrial achievement in modern history and yet they are routinely abandoned in the deserts, revealing the built-in obsolescence of our technology and society. The recycling of the 4.5 million parts of this “big aluminum can” is an extreme example of sustainable reuse and appropriation. 

Sidenote: American consumers and industry throw away enough aluminum in a year to rebuild our entire airplane commercial fleet every three months.  And just think of how many houses that would make.

David Hertz Architects, Inc.