Project Details
- Project Name
- House of Horns
- Location
- California
- Architect
- WOJR
- Project Types
- Single Family
- Project Scope
- New Construction
- Size
- 8,500 sq. feet
- Shared by
- Hanley Wood
- Project Status
- On the Boards/In Progress
2018 P/A Awards
Award
“I like how it splits into individual elements that come together very well, but also break down the scale. The way it’s established on existing foundations that were extrapolated into something radically different is really powerful.” — juror Reto Geiser
When is a house more than just a house? This year’s award-winning House of Horns in Los Altos, Calif., attempts to push the domestic envelope in more ways than one. Its creator is WOJR, an office that bills itself as more than just a design firm: founding principal William O’Brien Jr.’s self-described “organization for architecture” in Cambridge, Mass., is a collaborative venture spanning the creative spectrum, from urbanism to art, and the breadth of their approach is evident in the complexity of their latest residential project.
On one level, the House of Horns is a reasonably straightforward (if rather grand) private home: an 8,500-square-foot, two-story manse on a prominent hillside site intended for a non-nuclear family and replete with indoor spa and multiple bedrooms. In the design’s first break with convention, the lower level is embedded in the hillside, its concrete frame thrusting outwards from the primary envelope above; beside it, a curious pendant structure—a circle of concrete marking the upper walls of the spa—peeks above the ground like the lip of a strangely oversized well. These subtle formal swerves are taken up more forcefully in the building’s most immediately recognizable feature, its roofline—a sequence of parabolic peaks that give the building both its compellingly unfamiliar silhouette and its vaguely cultish-sounding name.
The horns are expressed in the interior as wildly curving ceilings, sloping up into windows that capture the light at different times of day and encourage the occupants to shift their activities around the house—a sort of free-range domesticity that’s further facilitated by an open plan dotted with floating partition walls, some with similarly curved profiles. Literally built on the existing foundations of an ordinary mission-style house, the House of Horns is a calculated attack on both the physical and programmatic norms of the suburban residential typology.
Project Credits
Project: House of Horns, Los Altos, Calif.
Client: Withheld
Design Architect: WOJR, Cambridge, Mass. . William O’Brien Jr., John David Todd, James Murray, Lindsey Krug, Marianna Gonzalez
Architect of Record: Jon Lott / Para Project, Brooklyn, N.Y. and Cambridge, Mass.
Contractor: Jared Wilcox / Jared’s Custom Homes
Structural Engineer: Ficcadenti Waggoner and Castle Structural Engineers
Lighting Consultant: O– LLC Lighting Design
HVAC/Plumbing/Environmental: Monterey Energy Group
Civil: Romig Engineers
Visualisation: D-Render, Los Angeles, California
Size: 8,500 square feet
Cost: Withheld
Read about the other winners in the 65th Annual Progressive Architecture Awards.
Project Description
FROM THE ARCHITECTS:
House of Horns acts as an instrument to register the cycles of the day through six "horns" or differently oriented skylights and clerestories. Four of the horns comprise the main living space of the house—a large space that provides an open context for a more nomadic appropriation of space—which allows the occupants to discover the variable lighting conditions that the horns provide. The design of House of Horns enfolds an existing foundation that was intended to be the foundation for an elaborate "Spanish Style" home. Our intention is to aim to undermine the faux formalities of the previous version of the design (designed by another architect) in favor of a new form of coherence that synthesizes the particularities of the foundation with a new set of ordering principles.
