The Leonard Residence by Ehrlich Architects

Ehrlich Architects has designed modern concrete house design combined with glass material creating beautiful 4000 sqf modern residence located on a 45-degree-angle downward sloping canyon site in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. Embracing an entry courtyard, the structure is a composition of vast areas in glass supported by steel and concrete, tracing its lineage to the case study houses of LA.

The hillside-bound site presented the most obvious challenge as well as opportunity for design. To achieve the vision objectives, the house is spliced into multiple levels to accommodate and embrace the steep slope yet make the most of all useable space, nearly panoramic views and augment privacy from the closely adjacent homes. Each level fluidly caters to specific living, working and relaxation needs of the residents, allowing for utmost efficiency and comfort.

The entrance level is greeted by a permanently-installed corten steel and glass dining table designed by the Architect. A two-story living room is suspended over the canyon on a structured concrete slab that also serves as the finished floor. From this level, a floating tread stair ascends to the master bedroom/bath suite and a floating reading loft affords classic LA views through the 20-foot high glass walls. Access to a roof terrace above the garage fosters sunbathing and relaxation.

The Garren Residence by Pique Architects

This beautiful and natural house design idea is the Garren residence located in Bend, Oregon. Designed by PIQUE Architects, this Garren residence is situated on a high desert prairie site and is a very low-slung building, with strong horizontal elements to visually tie the building to the landscape.

From the architects:

Three parallel axis walls orient the house toward prominent views and define outdoor rooms expanding the small footprint into the landscape. The structure features a central void that further integrates the exterior and interior. This void delivers natural light to the basement rooms as well as provides a private exterior gathering space in the center of the house.

Wall Less House Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, Japan by Tezuka Architects

This Wall Less House was designed and build by Tezuka Architects. This modern minimalist japanese house design is located in Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, Japan with 255.19m2 site area and 239.91m2 total floor area. The great lighting design of this japanese residential design was designed by Masahide Kakudate (Masahide Kakudate Lighting Architect & Associates, Inc.)



The Wall Less House Japan is supported by a central core and a pair of extremely thin columns. The absence of walls on the ground floor allows the internal space to extend to the garden on 360 degrees. The house stories consists of basement area and 3 floors. Construction project was done by Matsumoto Corporation and the construction period takes 8 month from start to finish ( April 2000 - December 2000 ).

Laminata, A House of Glass by Kruunenberg Architecten

Glass by Kruunenberg Architecten

Architects: www.2xu.nl
Location: Koningin Emmalaan 118 4141 EE Leerdam, The Netherlands
Area site: 2000 m2
Footprint: 340 m2
Gross area: 500 m2
Net area: 400 m2 (including parking)
Approx. building costs: $ 750,000
Start design+consultancy: November 1995
Start construction: May 2000
Completion construction: July 2001
photography: Luuk Kramer ©, Amsterdam
























As a monument to glass, this house totally redefines the use of glass as a building material. At the same time, despite its most unconventional application of glass, it is not merely an experimental monument but a beautiful functional residence.

The Miesian quality of lightness and transparency so sought after by modernist architects has given way to a solidity and materiality seldom associated with the use of glass. The remarkable feature is the use of laminated glass sheets for external and internal walls, which vary from 10 to an incredible 170 centimeters in thickness.























The crux of the underlying concept can be best described in the following processes. First visualize the creation of a massive rectangular block formed by gluing 2000 sheets of plate glass together. Then picture the shearing of this laminated block in its length against the 'grain' to form two massive elements. This initial cut selectively leaves some plates intact so that the central interior spaces are created when the two elements are separated. The intact plates also serve as a reference back to the original block as well as a reminder of the fragility of glass that contrasts with the solid laminated mass. Finally imagine the carving and hollowing out of the two elements to create the other living spaces.


















That of course is the concept for the design. In reality, the construction involved precutting 13,000 sheets of glass to size and then painstakingly cleaning and gluing each plate into its place on site. The resulting massive walls of laminated glass rest on one end, on the concrete understructure that forms the basement, and uphold on the other end, the plywood roof. It is a house full of juxtapositions; private and translucent, robust and fragile, brittle and flexible, serene and dynamic, untamed and elegant.
























Because this laminated glass is a prototype, extensive research was carried out by the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) to thoroughly investigate its suitability as a primary building material. Although the glass itself is naturally brittle, this inflexibility is countered by the use of a special two-component silicon glue that is UV-resistant and permanently flexible. Thus there is a certain amount of miniscule movement preserved between each sheet of glass to provide flexibility as a whole.

As for strength, although a single sheet is easily shattered by a hammer, taken together in unity, the laminated glass is as strong as concrete. Finally, the new material dispels any worries of the greenhouse effect. The massive glass walls combined with a central floor-heating system are capable of economically maintaining a constant pleasant temperature in winter and are thick enough to absorb and dissipate the summer heat without transferring it to the interior.














The Glass House was an initiative of the Leerdam housing association CWL. The brief specifically asked competition entrants to explore new ways of using glass in construction. (Leerdam is the center of the Dutch glass industry). Our firm won the first prize.

The Glass Box "X House" By Arquitectura X

This fantastic x-house is built like an opened glass box / glass house with a stunnig views of the valleys. Built in 2006-2007 in Quito, Ecuador, as you can see X House is one of a kind. X House allows you to look straight through to the other side in most areas. The rectangular home has floor to ceiling windows spanning its two floors. When looking at the home, the main focus has to be the large enclosed patio. The shape of the patio mirrors the home but on a smaller scale and is smartly separated from the rest of the interior home, making it feel like its own living space.




















Architects: Arquitectura X - Adrian Moreno Núñez, Maria Samaniego Ponce
Location: La Tola, valle de Tumbaco, Quito, Ecuador
Contractor: Adrian Moreno Núñez, Carlos Guerra Espinosa
Client: Adrian Moreno Núñez, Maria Samaniego Ponce, Lía Moreno Samaniego
Design year: 2003 – 2006
Construction year: 2006 – 2007
Structural Engineer: Pedro Caicedo
Electrical Engineer: Pedro Freile
Services: Raúl Cueva
Constructed area: 380 sqm
Photographs: Sebastián Crespo



















The X House Description :
Not having a site when we started design on our house, we set out an elemental scheme that could work both in Quito and the valleys east of the city; this meant distilling our experience into an abstracted form, inspired in the work of Donald Judd, that could be placed in any of the sites we would be likely to find: an open ended box, whose spatial limits would be the eastern and western ranges of the Andes.

As we had no actual place, we looked to the spaces we felt our own, and found the patio as the essential place maker throughout our architectural history. On the other hand was our fascination for the prototypical glass house and its possibilities in our year round temperate climate.



While the patio creates a sense of place it has to be enclosed in order to work, so the mountains can’t become the spatial limit. The glass house is perfect for that unlimited sense of space; the addition of a patio to the glass house gave us the chance to adapt to the different site possibilities.

We separated the private and public spaces defining a patio, the service spaces and circulation could be added as a plug-in as needed depending on site conditions, further defining the patio. Finally this diagram could be fitted into the open ended box according to specific site conditions that would define orientation, size and proportion.

Seifert House by BAU KULTUR

Seifert House by BAU KULTUR

Mrs. Seifert, sixty-three years old and curator of an art gallery, commissioned this house after her previous home, an approximately 150 years old building, burned down. For her new home she demanded a particular requirement - namely, the new house (contrary to her previous one) should fuse with nature in order to give her an immanent feeling of the change of seasons.





















Subsequently, the conception of the house became a deep engagement with Mies, in particular with the Farnswoth House, and the question of how a space should be constituted in order to open itself to the surrounding by simultaneously offering privacy.



























Furthermore, it became an investigation of how much freedom in space effectively determines the way of living in contrast to a few certain spatial determinations that liberate. Whereas the first model refers to Rietveld's attempts to create freedom e.g. by means of sliding doors etc. the later model refers to Mies' structured open plan.

Mrs. Seifert tried to follow and understand the conceptual approach with great interest, and supported final decisions on the construction. She spared no effort to understand Mies' architecture and made educational journeys.






















Architect: Michael Shamiyeh - BAU|KULTUR, Austria
Location: Volkersdorf, Enns, Austria
Structure Engineer: Helmut Schiebel
Contractor: Winfried Orth
Materials: Concrete & Glass
Photographs: Paul Ott

Werner Sobek Residential Project " H16 House"

The latest project of Werner Sobek that was build and completed in 2006 called the H16 House, the glass house that he designed for a young family in the village of Tieringen, not far from Stuttgart. The H16 House sits atop a knoll, on a 17,028-square-foot site overlooking the picturesque village. The H16 house that is owned by Helmut link, whose famoli business is fully recyclable with zero emissions and zero energy use. The client wishes for a Modern, flat-roofed house, with a full south facing view and no curtains.

This 'H16 House' consists of " two contrasting cubes responding to the particular situation on the inclined plot ". The transparent, all-glass cube features an open living space with a flexible ground plan and highly insulating triple glazing (individual pane dimensions: 2,36 x 3,63 m) to facilitate a pleasant room climate and the greatest possible transparency.

From the slope to the south of the house, one immediately apprehends its straightforward parti. A glass-and-steel volume, approximately 23 feet deep and 56 feet long, devoted to the living, dining, and kitchen areas, rests on a deeper, steel-framed base, containing bedrooms, roomy baths, and an office. Enclosed by charcoal-black, non-load-bearing, precast-concrete panels, this volume is about 31 feet deep and 54 feet long.

Operable, double-paned, narrow windows, between 16 inches and 3 feet in width and a little over 8 feet high, bring light and air into these lower-level quarters. A third, beige-precast-concrete volume, linked by a terrace and roof deck, contains the garage and service equipment for the 4,200-square-foot residence.

A glass volume for living and dining spaces perches serenely atop a black-concrete-paneled base.The two are linked to a third volume, a garage, by a roof deck and are backed by a limestone retaining wall.

Project Detail :

Architects : 3e - Werner Sobek exhibition & entertainment engineering, Stuttgart/Germany
Planning time : 2002 - 2005
Construction time : 2005 - 2006
Tasks completed : Architectural design and overall structural planning
Client : H. & G. Link, Balingen/Germany
Photographers : Zooey Braun, Stuttgart/Germany

See Related Article Here :
H16 House by Werner Sobek Engineering and Design
Photo © Zooey Braun.

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Glass Hose Design from House of The Future

What would it be the Shape and design of House for the Future....??? A Glass House Design Concept..??? This might be one of the solution for Future House Deisgn.

The basis of the Glass House was to design an environmentally responsive, ultra-low energy living space incorporating state-of-the-art material technologies.

The nanotechnology Design Concept that can be :
1. Enhance our lifestyle;
2. Improve natural lighting, thermal and acoustic performance of buildings;
3.Result in lower maintenance costs over the lifetime of buildings.

Some current Nanotechnologies and their applications include:

• smart materials
• nanopowders
• carbon nanotechologies
• molecular electronics

The Glass House will demonstrate recent advances in glass technology and engineering by Pilkington and G.James to show :

• Spectrally-selective qualities,
• Improved thermal performance, &
• Self cleaning attributes of glass.