This lakeside residence, Artreehoose designed by Della Valle Bernheimer in New Fairfield, provided two major structural design challenges. The first was the support of the bedrooms in the upper volume of the house that cantilever over the transparent living spaces below. This was accomplished using steel trusses supported on minimal columns below. The hybrid trusses are embedded in the walls of the bedrooms and supported on exposed solid steel bar columns 2in deep. The exposed columns range from 4in to 6in wide and are typically oriented East-West. When possible, the columns are offset from the truss lines helping them recede from notice.

The second challenge was to integrate the structure into a roof system that would allow for the filtration of light from above, similar to the canopy of trees surrounding the house. The roof “canopy” is comprised of closely spaced plywood joists 1in wide and 16in deep. The joists are formed from 8ft segments of plywood with staggered full depth scarf joints splicing the segments to provide for the 26ft span. Steel pipes are threaded through the joists at regular intervals with additional sleeved spacer pipes for increased stability and to allow for the transfer of shear at the joist ends. The resulting fins conceal both duct work and lighting and in several cases filter the light from skylights above.

Wedged into a tight lot along Lake Candlewood in New Fairfield, Connecticut, this new 5400 sf home’s form and structure was derived from observations of trees, sustainable building techniques, and the requirement that the structure match a previous home’s footprint. The architects used multiple study models in several media to investigate how light flows through perforations and secondarily to observe how certain materials would be suited to create a stable, discrete, but minimal structure that seemed to float and protect, much like tree canopies.

Organized around the central double-height volume spanned by long-span wood joists, the ground floor is wrapped in monumental sliding glass panels, opening up the house and connecting the inside, quite literally, to the outside. Wrapped in American Black Walnut, a stairwell to the second floor anchors the house like a tree trunk. Upstairs, two cantilevers contain bedrooms which jut out over the lake like into the surrounding trees themselves. Carefully located skylights illuminate the great room and each of the upstairs spaces, as if light were coming through gaps in tree branches.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 6:07 pm and is filed under Home Design. Tags: america house, Connecticut, Della Valle Bernheimer, design, exposed solid steel bar columns 2in, Home Design, House, Lake Candlewood, lakeside residence, Living Space, New Fairfield, Steel pipes, steel trusses, structural design, sustainable building, United States, United States Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.