All About Construction

On the first day on the project, we decided to fly it off a cliff,” says Brian MacKay-Lyons, describing the simple wood and steel–frame residence his firm designed. The two-story, 970-square-foot house juts out from its perch on a bluff overlooking Nova Scotia's windswept Atlantic coast. “We thought, 'we can be boring and build on land, or we can do it this way.' ” And so the Cliff House was born T he owners, a young family that shuttles between a primary residence in California and their native Nova Scotia, didn't want their summer house to upstage its dramatic site. To that end, Halifax-based MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects (MLS) hewed to their practice's principles, choosing simple materials: an envelope of cedar acts as a kind of “wood lampshade,” wrapping a steel frame, explains MacKay-Lyons. The area's ubiquitous fishing shacks served as inspiration for the Cliff House, and the architect expects the house's cladding, like that of the...

Program:  The client, a businessman with a young family, wanted to experiment with unusual construction methods for his new house on a steep hill overlooking the sea and mountains outside Barcelona. He had three requests—large windows to take advantage of views, privacy from the neighbors, and the use of a new concrete technology that, if successful, could be marketed and used in future projects Solution:  The architects designed an X-shaped, two-story house on a relatively flat step in the hillside and sprayed high-density concrete at high pressure to single-sided formwork, a technique usually used for tunnels and bridges, not residential work. Glazed portions of the structure were angled to allow privacy from the neighbors and to take advantage of views of the landscape. The family parks its cars and enters the house at the upper level—with a master suite and studio—and descends to the lower level for a double-height living area, three bedrooms, and a combined kitch...

Houses embedded in the earth are becoming a fashion. The reasons are compelling–the grass roofs reduce energy loads and their low profile doesn't impinge on the natural landscape. In the case of a 2,850-square-foot guesthouse in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, the clients, for whom Gluck had designed a main house on the site in 2004, wanted a separate structure to be located on property to the south between a creek and an access road. But they didn't want it to interfere with the splendid mountain vista they had from the main house. “So many views are destroyed by plunking buildings on top of the land,” The architects configured the guesthouse as two rectilinear steel-framed bars that intersect; the primary one contains open living and dining spaces, with a roof gradually rising to the south at a 20-degree angle. The volume seems to collide with and lift over a rectilinear structure running east–west on a diagonal, which contains three bedrooms and the garage. A wall...