00:00It just occurred to me that the forms that these materials might suggest to us might
00:11be much more exciting and radical than anything we could come up with ourselves.
00:16Any particular material will suggest a completely different world of form if you really listen.
00:22And to me that seemed worthwhile.
00:26It seemed like something worth devoting a lifetime to.
00:35My name is Omer Arbel and I designed the 75.9 house.
00:39This house is called 75.9 because it's the ninth iteration of the 75th idea that we've
00:46authored in our studio.
00:47We have a general philosophy in the studio which is that form should be born of a material's
00:53intrinsic properties, glass, wood, and in this case concrete.
00:57And so when our clients approached us, I said that that's what I wanted to do.
01:01I wanted to explore the sculptural potential of concrete in this kind of unpredictable
01:06way.
01:07In other words, to set in motion a way of making that we author without predicting what
01:14it might look like when finished.
01:17So I think it's kind of amazing that they went for it because it's such a huge amount
01:22of risk.
01:25We've always had a critique of contemporary concrete construction, which is that it's
01:29a fluid, dynamic material.
01:31But those attributes of the material are never acknowledged in the finished forms that you
01:37see people making out of concrete.
01:39And we've been doing that at the scale of an object for many years.
01:42To bring that philosophy into the scale of architecture has been quite a challenge, but
01:47also just an amazing opportunity.
01:49It's almost like living with a very eccentric roommate or something like that, like to try
01:52to make something that's not necessarily comfortable coexist within a comfortable home environment
01:58for a family.
01:59I thought that could make an exciting premise for architecture.
02:13In Vancouver, it rains eight months of the year.
02:15It's really rainy.
02:16So we thought the experience of entry could be really wonderful if it was very lush.
02:21So the idea of what we're calling the winter garden is that it's very, very overgrown.
02:26You see it here in its infancy.
02:28That's sort of one idea about it.
02:29And the other one is that these things are not that far from being lily pads themselves.
02:34Above us is the first lily pad.
02:36And what you're looking at here is the dining room.
02:39So what you'll notice is that we've changed height.
02:41It sort of explodes as soon as you enter, and then it intentionally gets low over the
02:47dining table.
02:48So that feeling of expanding and then contracting gives you an intimate feeling of the space,
02:54but also totally focused on the field.
02:57You're seated.
02:58You have this like very heavy thing above you, but your experience is thrown out into
03:03the sunset.
03:04We thought of forming it using fabrics.
03:12I'm not the first to explore this, but this is probably the first time the technique of
03:18fabric forming was explored at scale.
03:20It's almost like a reverse tent structure, if you think of it.
03:23There are stiff parts, like the tent poles, if you use that analogy, and then there's
03:27the soft parts, which are the fabric.
03:29And our role was to sculpt the form such that it could, on the one hand, attain all these
03:35technical requirements that we had to respond to, but also to keep the process open-ended
03:40enough to surprise us, so that the form really responded to what the material wanted to do,
03:45not necessarily what we wanted it to do.
03:48One of the innovations of the method that we developed, and this came from our structural
03:51engineers, was to concoct the recipe for the concrete such that its rate of curing
03:59followed the rate of pouring the concrete very closely.
04:04These took like 12 hours to pour, or something like that, on the one hand, and then have
04:09the speed of curing closely match that rate of pouring, such that the pieces attain structural
04:15integrity as the pour is happening.
04:19And also, it allowed us to really trust the fabric formwork, because you can imagine that
04:24a lot of the hydrostatic tension no longer had to all fall on the one part of the stem
04:30that's closest to the ground, but was rather distributed over the entire length of the piece.
04:37One of the things I love and didn't really anticipate was the juxtaposition of, on the
04:43one hand, the weight of the concrete, something feeling so massive, especially above us, and
04:48on the other hand, something kind of pillowy and soft.
04:52I like to play with this idea of compression and expansion.
04:56So we have just been compressed in the dining room, and then we make our way to the living
05:01room and the space expands above us, again, sort of like in the direction of the westerly
05:06facing field.
05:07And so the sunset's very strong in this room, and you have a contrast between the height
05:12on the one hand and the horizontality of the site on the other.
05:19Given that these concrete pieces are so brutal and possibly uncomfortable, I felt that the
05:26contrast needed to be warmth, and that's why we really wanted oak.
05:30And I think that without the wood, it might make for an amazing cultural space or something
05:36like that, but as a home, it needed something to anchor it back into an experience that
05:41humans identify as comfortable.
05:49The sunsets over the fields are just sublime experiences.
05:53And so to orient most of the spaces such that they capture that magical west light and such
06:00that the windows could really sort of, almost as if you were in a ship and you were sort
06:04of seeing the horizon over the ocean, felt like the most poetic response to this site
06:10that I could come up with.
06:19And then east light, we treat it as a mysterious thing.
06:23It appears almost in all the spaces, but in a mysterious way and not directly.
06:27It's filtered, it comes in ambient.
06:30So that again is a contrast.
06:36I'm the creative director of a company called Bocce, and we make predominantly lighting.
06:41I made these sort of clouds, cloud forms.
06:44This particular piece is called 100, and it was new when this house was starting to
06:48come to the later stages of the construction project.
06:51And our clients fell in love with them.
06:53So my role was simply to compose how they might interact with the spaces.
06:57And in general, I like seeing lighting as a way to experience volumes that you can't
07:03really occupy with your body.
07:07Here we can see another intention, which I had in the scenario of a gathering or a party.
07:12There would be people down here in the living room, but also up there in the outdoor dining room.
07:16So there is that idea of a second topography.
07:19And you're always passing sort of under or over the concrete lily pads.
07:27So we began by making small castings this big and then larger and larger, trying to
07:32prove the method.
07:34But what we learned very quickly is it doesn't really scale up.
07:37And so really the only way to do it is to try it at scale.
07:40And that was a kind of amazing thing to discover is you can't really prepare.
07:44And one of the ways that we navigated that, let's call it trepidation, was to say, OK,
07:50let's just make one lily pad, a small one, and see how it goes.
07:55And so we made a small one, a five meter tall one, and it was successful.
07:59Everybody sort of believed in the idea after that.
08:06Our builder was fearless.
08:07And can you imagine just pouring all that concrete into basically a tent structure and
08:11just hoping for the best?
08:13It's like it's wild.
08:14That's courage.
08:24This is the primary bedroom that opens out to the west to the field.
08:29Right beyond here is the first concrete piece we made.
08:33It has a more awkward quality to it.
08:36And it's heavier and it's more stretched out in its proportions.
08:41And it's beautiful because it's what proved that the method works.
08:45Now it's just part of the house.
08:47I wanted a more intimately scaled concrete piece in the place where you experience water.
08:52The quality of water and the liquid nature of these concrete works seemed compatible.
08:59We are in an outdoor zone right next to the primary bedroom,
09:04because this is very private.
09:06It doesn't seem private, but it really is because you're surrounded by a field.
09:10The main shower is an outdoor shower.
09:12And the idea here was we just tugged on the fabric a little bit to make that spout.
09:17And so the water falls from that little protrusion above.
09:21To bring in light into the buried portions of the house,
09:25we needed to sort of carve out these curved shapes.
09:29And so because it's a retaining wall, it made sense to build it out of concrete.
09:33And because we had developed this method, we thought to apply it to the surface of a wall.
09:38The pillowed surface is a direct consequence of the hydrostatic pressure of the concrete.
09:42So wherever you have one of these, you have the plywood rib.
09:45And then fabric is draped here.
09:48And as the concrete fills up, it pushes out and makes these sort of swells, pillow-like forms.
09:58A device that I used compositionally throughout the work
10:02was this idea that the concrete works were found objects.
10:07And they are not found. We made them.
10:09But it was a useful mental device to compose with.
10:14As if it were ruins of a 5,000-year-old structure that were discovered here.
10:19And then our role was to sort of encase them or exhibit them
10:24with the tools of contemporary architecture at our disposal.
10:29This idea of modernist forms or containers for the lily pads to inhabit
10:35again made sense to make them feel warm.
10:38We clad them in wood, but that also should suggest or hint at what's happening inside.
10:43We, in a very compositional, deliberate way, carved out window openings into those volumes.
10:49Through those, you see the concrete forms.
10:52In the sort of cropped way, the same way you might crop a work of art or a photograph.
11:03The horizon is aggressive and relentless.
11:06And the sunset makes it even more sublime, but intense.
11:10And we felt like topography would modulate that experience
11:14and make it kind of rich, but not too aggressive.
11:18We draped the field over the house,
11:20which meant that there are these hills that berm over certain rooms.
11:24In this particular case, it's the corridor. Over there is the primary bedroom.
11:28And bringing light into those rooms required us to come up with some sort of method or device.
11:34We did it by carving out these essentially light wells that could also be inhabited.
11:40So each one is a little courtyard,
11:43introducing an outdoor space that has intimacy and dimension
11:47and an otherwise vast and relentless horizon.
11:56The concrete lily pads are hollow because they are effectively planters
12:01of gigantic, mature trees on the roof, or what will become gigantic trees.
12:05And so all that drainage from these enormous planters has to pass through these stems.
12:10And that means that they have to be hollow.
12:20It's a surreal moment to have trees floating.
12:22It doesn't register that as logical in our minds. It's a dreamscape.
12:26I like inviting these moments of surrealism into the project,
12:30which you maybe don't even realize you're experiencing,
12:33but they give the experience of inhabitation a dreamlike quality.
12:44We have climbed up the stairs, and now we're looking at the downstairs.
12:49So the two large pieces on both sides of the dining room are bathed in south light.
12:55You can see that there's a skylight surrounding three of the four faces.
12:59And the intent there is to make them feel like they're kind of floating
13:03and surrounded with a halo of sky.
13:09We are on top of the dining room lily pads.
13:11So this is the outdoor dining room.
13:13Imagine, in your mind's eye, this tree 30 years from now, much bigger and fuller.
13:18So here we see the intention of having this sort of secondary landscape.
13:22This is cedar, which is a material that's associated with this region.
13:26And it has the nice quality of silvering over time,
13:30which we thought was very beautiful when considered against the texture
13:34of the grey concrete and the grey clouds of Vancouver.
13:48We live in a world of one-size-fits-all solutions.
13:51We wear the same clothes, listen to the same music, and eat the same food.
13:54And it's like, what if we developed forms that can't be repeated?
13:58These forms, if we were to repeat exactly the same process,
14:01would yield different results in another site.
14:04I find that interesting. I think that's meaningful.
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