Keeping it Simple

The client would have none of it – no illusions, no architectural tricks. She wanted simplicity; the living room roof would be flat, its windows perceptible as such. The cross axis would be straight and uninterrupted.

The architects were devastated to have their favourite devices rejected. “It was as though she were the artist working through us,” Olson recalls. But he came around. What the client had done, he realized, “was to take us back to our roots” and, specifically, to the first house. Once on track together architects and client undertook to make the house ever more naturalistic. With perimeter gardens and trees and grasses on the lake side, the entire site will read as a garden with a house embedded in it.

The house is emerging as one of Olson’s favourites, as was the first. He hoped that it will be “timeless, like a Mayan ruin disappearing back into the landscape.”

Olson Sundberg has a loosely organized “eco-committee,” comprising a changing group of interested employees who research and advise on diverse aspects of sustainability in the firm’s designs. The committee was partially responsible for such conserving elements as the stone floors, wide overhangs, zoned heating and air conditioning, and the use of recycled and recyclable materials that will be employed in the house.

But Olson sees the most basic kind of conservation as building to last. “These houses should only get better with time”, he says, and time already has proven him right about the first one.

5. Answer the questions to part II:

1. Did the owner of the third house help to develop its design?

2. What were her requirements for the design of the house?

3. Why did Olson call the site “a scar”?

4. What types of houses did the client respond to when making collages?

5. What idea did Olson try to realize in this house?

6. Can you describe the basic scheme of the house?

7. Will the vegetation be preserved on site according to the architects’ scheme?

8. What were the watchwords of the house design?

9. What techniques were to help them be realized?

10. Did the client support the project of her future house?

11. On what points did the opinions about the character of the house differ?

12. What was the final scheme of the house?

13. Did Olson himself like it?

14. What was the “eco-committee” responsible for?

15. What is Olson opinion of conservation?

16. Does he have grounds to think so?