Architecture Wednesday: Croft

The Croft House, or more likely, the spacecraft house, sits along the South coast of Victoria and was built to take in the views, as well as be protected from the prevailing winds. So, the architect built the house around a protected garden from which peripheral vision of the sea and sky is permitted by tapered facades.

The idea of Croft is that it is a shelter in an exposed environment, and that shelter contains all the necessary activities of domestic life in a minimalist style. But it is also designed to take advantage of local materials in an environmentally friendly sort of way.

The small material pallet of grey metal and concrete blends with the muted shale geology, and the protective exterior is warmed internally by compressed sand thermal mass walls and looks similar to the distant sand dunes. And since all the materials inside the home--the Victoria ash timber and the bluestone--are locally harvested, the impact on the environment is as minimal as the design.

And the design process adopts the 1950ʼs modernist philosophy of ʻplastic integrityʼ as well as the concept of architecture as a field of energies and flows. The form of the house distorts mathematical and structural curves to achieve the interior purpose; the adopted geometry and composition of three sine curves means details are achievable with 2 dimensional radii. Both concave and convex roof surfaces are 2 dimensional planes and constructed from conventional battens and rafters and corrugated metal. 

Um, I didn't know there would be math ... ?

But, I could live it in, though i might worry that one day it might just lift off from the planet and go soaring away.

source