Design as a Verb - Lake Michigan Modern
How did DeForest Architects use a series of hand and digital models to turn a leaf on the sand into a family vacation home overlooking Lake Michigan? Find out in our second video, focusing on Design As A Verb. Let us know what you think!
Want to see more of this project? Visit the Lake Michigan Modern project page, and to learn more about our design approach as Lake Tahoe Architects designing homes in California, the midwest, and beyond, visit our Rural Retreats page.
Project Team
DeForest Architects Lake Tahoe Studio | Brett Smith, Geoff Briggs, Julie Kim
Contractor | Vandermale Builders
Structural | Engineered Structures, LLC
Environmental Consultant | Peterson Environmental
Photographer | Justin Maconochie
Categories | Rural Retreats
Transcript
00:04 This home is near Grand Haven, Michigan in the dunes on Lake Michigan. It's a three-bedroom, 3 and a half bath, 3300 ft² home. What we want to share with this video today is some of the modeling techniques in particular that we use to go from a big poetic idea that has to do with the place and the client to an actual building.
00:22 On this area of the shoreline of Lake Michigan, most of the houses are set up so that there's a house on the property with a waterside and a roadside. One of the things that we found that was unusual about this site was, first off,
00:38 that the house has better views down the lake than if it was oriented straight out with the topography of the dune on the south side. This also created an opportunity so that we created this outdoor space that was sheltered from some of the winds and created a different character of space.
00:54 It also allows you to see through as you're approaching out to the water. So, this is a really simple block model that we did, testing out different configurations of the basic spaces in the house and how it would fit into the dunes. And from there you can see that this becomes a little bit more gestural and free form.
01:11 That starts to break down just the simple block geometry and think about how horizontal surfaces like slopes and patios and terraces and roof planes work. So, one of the things we noticed as we started looking at those roof planes was that the configuration
01:29 of the spaces in the house to create this outdoor space on the south side and the view orientation that was optimal for them and a low-profile street-facing side of the house created this angle between these two pieces of program. One of the ideas that came up
01:45 was this idea of a leaf on the dune. There are two ideas that struck us about this. The first is something sitting very lightly on the dunes. And the second one was thinking about how once you put something on the dunes, it changes the patterns in the sand. What started to emerge is that it really
02:03 needed to be one roof that connected those two geometries of space. And that folded plane was a way to do that that was more about that single leaf sitting on the site than thinking of it as a collection of roofs. One of the advantages of the computer model is that
02:20 you can inhabit it in a different way than a scale cardboard model. So, it's possible for us to understand the proportions of the spaces in more detail as we're developing those. Again, this is an abstraction of the final house that allows us to concentrate on those things without
02:37 getting caught up in detail yet to come like what are the materials, what's the siding, what's the exact window breakup and things like that. This model is using images to show the project in the context of the site and then pulling all of that together with both the material that are proposed and the site development.
02:54 This is an example of a model that is using that structure in a way that we can help the team understand how it works. The geometry appears complex, but it was based on two sections of the roof that were at a consistent pitch and then connecting the
03:11 pieces that fit in between. In this case, we shared this model with the steel fabricators, and they used that for their fabrication drawings. It also makes things like this possible where we can take something as gestural as a cardboard model with a leaf-shaped roof and make it real.
03:32 So, these are some of those steel elements as they were being installed in the field. And you can see that based on the model that we had, those elements were placed by the steel fabricator and they designed those connections to meet all those dimensional criteria and then put them up.
03:51 This is another in a series of videos that we're trying that is really getting at the idea of sharing design as a verb. The tendency is to show the beautiful picture at the end, which we have here, and maybe something that's artistic in the beginning, and skip over the rest of it.
04:09 And we think that's where some of the most exciting, interesting, engaging, fun, challenging, promising work happens. And that's a story that's not really told. If you're curious about what it's like to work with a residential architect who sees design as a hands-on collaborative process,
04:27 we invite you to explore more of how we do that in our design approach on our website or give us a call, send us an email. We'd love to hear from you and talk about it.