Project Details
- Project Name
- Glitch House
- Location
- Dominican Republic
- Architect
- Young Projects
- Project Types
- Single Family
- Project Scope
- New Construction
- Size
- 1,650 sq. feet
- Shared by
- Hanley Wood
- Project Status
- On the Boards/In Progress
2018 P/A Awards
Citation
“Often, such projects try to blend in with their context. But this is a fresh, graphic, and fun interpretation of siting. It combines a certain digital sensibility with super-simple craft.” —juror Florian Idenburg, Intl. Assoc. AIA
At a scant 1,650 square feet, Brooklyn, N.Y.–based Young Projects’ Glitch House is a modestly sized vacation home whose circumstances are anything but modest. Located near the Dominican Republic’s Playa Grande, a beach often ranked among the most exquisite in the world, the house is set back into a secluded site, away from its neighbors and ensconced in a lush quasi-rainforest whose canopy hangs close above a rooftop garden.
Structurally, the housing type is a fairly conventional one for the tropics, composed of stacked concrete masonry blocks. Once again, however, the manner of their deployment is distinctly novel. Façades are rotated 45 degrees so as to create a series of irregular volumes; the blocks are staggered to create a 3D stepped pattern on those angled façades. More arresting than all this perhaps is the cladding. Handmade encaustic cement tiles adhered to the blocks—each with a quarter-arc of bright color against a dark background—are arranged in vaguely vegetal patterns, covering the house with a dazzling mosaic in blue, green, and orange, and making it seem to almost shimmer in the patchy jungle shadows.
Drawing inspiration from the vivid colors and organic shapes of the jungle itself, the cladding is neither uniformly nor arbitrarily applied to the exterior, but assumes distinct formations around doors, windows, and other features, weaving itself deftly into the designers’ functional and formal scheme.
Inside, that scheme flows with surprising spatial fluidity from room to room through the artfully misaligned boxes of the envelope, each of the spaces differentiated in plan by the intrusion of the canted walls with their stepped blocks. Hoisted up from the forest floor on the house’s upper story, the main living quarters make it feel as though one were living in a treehouse, while terraces on the main living level open the house to the natural world surrounding it.
Project Credits
Project: Glitch House, Playa Grande, Dominican Republic Client: Withheld
Architect/Interior Designer/Lighting Designer: Young Projects, Brooklyn, N.Y. . Bryan Young, AIA (principal); Noah Marciniak (studio director); Sina Özbudun, Bastian Feltgen (designers); Jessica Pace (junior designer)
Contractor/Construction Manager/Civil Engineer: Vanderhorst & Ruíz
Structural Engineer: Ivan Fernandez
M/P Engineer: INICA Electrical Engineer: Symantel
Geotechnical Engineer: EPSA-LABCO
Landscape Architect: Juan Diego Vásquez
Size: 1,650 square feet (interior), 330 square feet (roof garden)
Cost: Withheld
Read about the other winners of the 65th Annual Progressive Architecture Awards.
Project Description
FROM THE ARCHITECTS:
Nestled below the jungle’s canopy is the Glitch House at Playa Grande. The 1,650 square foot building contains 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, kitchen and living areas and 330 square feet of accessible roof garden. CMU block is the primary construction element and therefore dictates the dimensions of the four main volumes. Flat CMU walls oriented to a rectilinear grid are juxtaposed with those rotated 45 degrees from the main orthogonal axes. These chamfered walls help the main volumes of the building mass lose their sharp, definite boundaries. On these walls, the CMU blocks do not change their orthogonal orientation and thus reveal extra faces as the blocks stagger to create these diagonal facades. The exposed faces of all the blocks are clad with square encaustic cement tiles imprinted with a simple quarter-arc of various colors. At first glance, the arrangement of over 10,000 cement tiles alludes to a camouflage pattern as the Glitch House sits motionless in the lush forest. However, the aggregate effect of the tile patterning both blurs and enhances the presence of the house due to the careful control of the color and graphic arrangement of the repetitive tiles. Two distinct patterns shift and merge across the facades of the building and react specifically to changes in the building’s geometry, highlighting entrances by aligning uniformly on the adjacent walls or mirroring across the chamfer surfaces to create numerous local symmetries. Upon approach to the building, what from afar may be read as simply a smear of color comes into focus as the consequence of a glitchy, responsive pattern.
