loose form ant ventures
project | weather screens by stephanie white
ailerons shutters slack response motion
In the days when I was doing a lot of travelling with my dog and cat, I could only find very odd places to live where petlets were allowed. They all shared an extreme porosity to weather and they were all, in their various ways, beautiful. The tiny North Carolina sharecropper’s house with its bee hive between two joists in the kitchen (the wall hummed, warm to the touch) sat at the edge of a 30-acre field edged with cornflowers and poppies. The old store in Texas had a 15-foot pressed tin ceiling that collected hot air all day and kindly radiated it back at night, whether you wanted it or not. The fishing shed in Nova Scotia had been made into a little cabin, heated by an oil range that also kept it dryish in that climate of sleeting horizontal rain and snow. The houseboat was an experimental hovercraft that had gone to Dunkirk in WWII, rescued its stranded soldiers, and retired to Chelsea Reach. Being wood, it had a slight problem with mould – shoes were especially vulnerable if left unworn for a few days. These were great places. I loved them dearly. You had to work a bit at living in them.
house for a hot, humid climate: breeze is needed, but the storms that come from humidity differentials can blow a house down. Like hurricane breakaway walls that quickly detach and blow away saving the basic structure, we need a wall here that can turn transparent to extreme wind, opaque to sun, translucent to breeze, tight in the winter, generous in the summer. Can the whole structure be so sloppy, with all joints and connections so full of tolerance, that at rest, the house sighs and settles into a casual looseness. The roof, shaped to lift in the wind like an aircraft wing, can draw up the whole structure, snapping joints tight, pulling sheathing up into channels making it weathertight to wind, until it becomes dangerously opaque and resistant, at which point under pressure, shutters snap open under the eaves. Could it all be done with the building simply responding to air pressure? Probably. We would be living in an architecture that was always changing with the weather. We would know what was happening outside by what was happening inside. We would be living in the world through a building. *
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On Site review 21: stormy weather
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