00:00My favorite architectural scene in all movies is when Dorothy opens the door and outside the door
00:15it's color from black and white and that quite possibly is the first time most people had ever
00:23seen color film in their life the right sort of build up to something really beautiful I call it
00:35choreography the best way to experience architecture is by moving through it and
00:41scanning and looking around and so if you realize that then you can make the architecture amplify
00:49the place I'm Jim Cutler principal designer at Cutler Anderson Architects and I designed this place about 10 years ago
01:09I got a call like we always do from potential clients and they had already chosen a piece of
01:15land it was a hilltop and it was really beautiful spot but I needed to remind them that it's very easy
01:24to bring cars into places but it's really hard to get them out we were coming down from that hilltop and
01:30I noticed a visual clearing in the woods and I said what's that over there they said oh it's an old
01:36logging pond you know it's all filled in and I walked around there's this wonderful tree stump outside here
01:42and I said you know if I was going to design something for you I'd design something here and
01:47I would integrate the building in the pond as one thing and they asked me why and I explained to them at that
01:55point in my career and I had become very versed to killing anything any living thing I mean the world is just
02:02so beautiful and everything has the same right to be here whether it's inanimate or a plant or a
02:10a creature for many years I felt that fostering life creating habitat is a high calling in life
02:20you know water fosters life and I could somehow integrate a pond in a building if we build it
02:26they will come put it that way and uh one time I was out here with Michael one half of the owners
02:34and he's very in touch with the living world so we were sitting out here in the evening he said you know
02:39in about 10 minutes uh the flickers are going to come by and they're going to start eating the
02:44insects off the pond 10 minutes the flickers come by and then the swallows are going to come by
02:51the swallows come in it's getting a little dark I think the bats are going to come in bats come in
02:57this place had connected him to the rhythms of life that water fosters
03:06power of architecture is emotional when you choose a place that you're going to dwell in
03:13and then there's an obligation to know that place well because there's life
03:28we're coming up the walk to the house and we deliberately parked guests far away and we designed
03:37it in a way to make it actually quite narrow and you can see that you sense the clearing just by the
03:44amount of sky you can see beyond these trees but to reinforce what happens when you walk in the front
03:50door that you open up to the pond we even tighten the path up further and then as you come on the house
03:58you know there's something special on the other side of that door and we wanted to give some
04:03implication you were going to get there but the door then acts as the foil
04:19i'm squeezing you because the tighter it is the bigger big feels the lighter it is the darker dark
04:27is by contrast they amplify one another but i don't want to be like boom you know
04:33to surprise you when you walk in the door so i wanted to bring a little bit of the pond on that
04:37side and i wanted you to see over the roof so you could sense the clearing on this side
04:43and create a level of anticipation of arriving somewhere
04:53these are steel beams holding this up the reason the steel beams is we thought we'd have a lot of hue
04:59if i had to do this in wood it would have been much thicker and deeper and we would have blocked
05:04view so then you have to start using materials within their nature once you get going on a design
05:11and if you're lucky and if you're listening it tells you what it wants it's this sort of
05:19cacophony of different voices for me the steel wants to show what it can do the wood wants to show what
05:25it can do you know the forest wants to show its history and its nature the water wants to show
05:30how it fosters life how do you take all that cacophony of voices and you turn it into a harmony
05:37that's my job the owners wanted the stronger connection of the pond as possible
05:55so when we designed this i i had a lot of fun
06:03kind of see this right here it's about a 400 pound piece of lead and there's one on either side
06:12it counterweight this door let's see if it'll open
06:23now that's an 800 pound door and that wasn't so hard to lift because now you can see the leads
06:32all the way down here and that is a heavy piece of lead and so we have three of them one at the
06:39kitchen one at the living room and one in the bedroom so that when you're in the building you
06:45don't necessarily need to be in the building you can be in the pond oh another frog nope two frogs
06:54look at them you got to have a place to dive off you don't want to splash water back on the oak floor
07:01and yeah you know it just seemed like such a poetic spot to sit in the eagle
07:06you can take it all in all the sounds all the animals everything and to some degree you can take
07:14in the silence
07:22it's a nice kitchen we'd wanted to have a window there and it was also the best possible place for
07:27the range it was a fun thing to design and it works shocking well the fireplace is the lateral stability
07:42we're we're in a sizable earthquake zone and if you do a roof like this where you can see all the way
07:49from one end to the other that's a lot of load up high so that if an earthquake wants to move the building
07:56sideways well it's going to do it and the only way to restrain that lateral movement is with some degree
08:04of mass or a structural stability in this axis so the fireplace is a structural element and it's
08:12the uh for me a statement about the lateral forces that are endemic to this region
08:31i'd say 95 percent of the building was from this region you know and it's reflective of this region
08:38you know glue and beams were invented here vertical grain for uh plywood was invented here and comes
08:47here because it's the only place douglas fur grows and it's light so it's well suited for structure
08:54cedar which the outside of the building is made of red cedar which is from here it's highly aerated
09:00it's a very light physically light wood and it's extremely rot resistant so we're using it within its
09:07nature we're using the douglas fur within its nature so you'll notice there are little bits of concrete
09:12out on the corners here they all line up so when you look at the side plane of this it looks like an
09:18ancient giant swimming pool that has been partly let's say subsumed by detritus and uh and sediments
09:29but still there's a vestige of that swing i look back on it now that's a little bit of a frou-frou
09:35metaphor but i wanted to create a sense of time and by leaving objects in the landscape it pushes the
09:46time reference for the project
09:48the bedroom is pretty much all the same in the sense one thing i would say is it is glass between
10:06the living room better because we wanted the roof which is the sheltering of it to be one continuous
10:12plane it would be a parrot to make this feel more like a pavilion and when you think of pavilion you think
10:18of an outdoor area under a roof my god that cat has a regal pose i see
10:27i like the needle he's a good one
10:37and you have to walk outside to get the guest house and i'll tell you i built a little cabin for my
10:44daughter and myself she actually helped build it when she was 11. that's a wonderful thing and it's
10:49only about 35 feet from the front door of our house and there is not one night that goes by when
10:55i'm running back and forth and look out at the water or listen to the wind in the trees or look at the
11:01moon or what planets are coming by and i had no hesitation in making that separation where you got to
11:07walk outside to get to another room of the house when you go from this one to that one you experience
11:14the outside you hear the water you see the water and if it's windy you hear the trees if it's snowing or
11:20raining you hear the water coming down in the pond why not experience the place fully i mean it's really a joy
11:26i talked about architecture being shelter we could take that and say it's clothing right keeps you warm
11:38and dry so if you're clothing the institution of family you better know it's anatomy i mean you're
11:44wearing a sweatshirt right now and might be from the gap for all i know but one size kind of fits all
11:49it's got sleeves and a hole for your head and you know piece to cover your trunk but in a way that's
11:56that's no different than this house or the institution of family that you're going to
12:01clothe because families have very specific qualities there are public zones like the room we're in and
12:10there are private zones like the bedrooms and there are decision points like entries where you get to
12:18make a decision whether you want to participate on something in the public or you want to go to your
12:23private zone and they don't want to mix they want to have as much separation as possible and in small
12:30houses that's tricky but that's the anatomy you're trying to clothe the only difference between me and
12:36the gap is you can think of me more as a civil role you know tailor i tailor things
12:43when you bring someone to an emotional understanding of things of something that's beautiful they learn
12:58to love it and teaching people to love the living world is actually i think the highest quality that
13:05any human being could have because we're killing this place i want to describe a method of working
13:15that is different than the mainstream and i'm hoping that i get a few lucky souls that get it and move in
13:23in that direction
13:53you
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