Sitting in front of the boulder at his drafting desk, Aldo sketched out ideas on trace paper. Over the course of a few days, he had accumulated a dozen design directions he could take. As with most projects he had designed, it was the first idea and first sketch that stuck with him the most. He took that first design and broke it down, redesigned it in multiple iterations, and sketched revisions of it until he settled on the direction he wanted it to go. He quickly constructed a sketch model of the home and took it out to the site to study it further. Holding the model up in his hand, he envisioned the full-scale version built out before him. While studying it in this way, he broke off pieces of the model, discarded them or moved them around, broke off more and worked to simplify it until he reached what he knew the home needed to become.
It swiftly began to take form on paper and in the computer, as plans and details were drafted up. He had arrived at a home that would be mostly glass but also needed to blend into the surrounding landscape. The glass then needed to be hidden or screened or reflective, which wasn’t the right choice for this home. to achieve the near invisibility on the site, he came up with an external louver system that would wrap the home in wood slats, shading the glass and also keeping it hidden. Simultaneously, concrete, dyed to camouflage into the hillside, would form most of the structure, crawling down the hill. Aldo really focused on the joinery of the materials to pull this off. How they terminated or how they connected had to be seamless to make his ideas work. He mocked up a number of material details and arrived at some beautiful solutions. Solutions that would soon be praised by design critics as “bold and innovative” and “elegant in an exceptionally simple way.”
A Page a Day 