Modern Home Design, Home Plans, Interior

Modern Home Design - Stack House by Slade Architecture

This modern home is named Stack House designed by Slade Architecture, located in Ordos, Inner Mongololia, China. The master plan encircled each house with a public footpath juxtaposing two conflicting desires: private retreat and public display. We accepted this tension as a primary design challenge.

To engage the public we explored the dynamic relationship between the viewer and the object by manipulated the shape of this Modern Home Design to play with perspective and volumetric clarity. The building form presents a changing perception of the scale, geometry and massing from different exterior points of view to create an engaging ambiguity. This ambiguity works against the clear platonic cube suggested by the master plan.

The private interior courtyard at the center of this Modern Home Design provides a sanctuary and retreat shielded from public view while allowing edited outward views. The building mass is carved to provide edited views from the interior courtyard and allow sunlight into the center of the building. From the central courtyard the planted roof yields a green pastoral scene with an almost scale-less quality (editing out neighboring houses with a false horizon). The courtyard creates a sheltered, central node for this Modern Home Design and allows for visual interconnections between the living spaces.

In much the same way that the overall massing works with point of view and perception, the skin of this Modern Home Design changes throughout the day depending on the location of the sun and the viewer. At different moments, the brick skin wraps smoothly, pulls apart to create light portals or rotates on its own axis—creating a continuous patterned skin of changing opacity and texture.

The shifting geometries of the bricks are generated by the geometries of the intersecting walls. These geometries ripple out from the corners, normalizing themselves to the surface of the plane as they move away from the generating corner. The corner bricks create interlocking “zipper” connections – clearly expressing the generative geometries of this Modern Home Design.

Thermal swings are mitigated passively by using the thermal mass of the ground around the sunken volume and the mass of the water in the pool; cooling warm summer air by transferring heat to the earth and warming cold winter air. The pool of this Modern Home Design also cools the space through evaporative cooling in the summer.

The stack effect of rising warm air helps move air naturally through this Modern Home Design. Louvers trap the warm air in winter to gain the sun’s warmth and act as an insulating layer. Green planted windows create living shading devices. During summer months, plants shade windows reducing heat gain. In winter, light and heat stream into windows unencumbered by foilage.

Modern Home Design - Stack House by Slade Architecture

Modern Home Design - Stack House by Slade Architecture

Modern Home Design - Stack House by Slade Architecture

Modern Home Design - Stack House by Slade Architecture