M1 House / FRPO Rodriguez & Oriol

M1 House / FRPO Rodriguez & Oriol

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Text description provided by the architects. M1 House is the first project of a series carried out for Malaspina Design, a leading company in the design of sustainable housing in the State of Oregon, on the West Coast of the USA, that contacted us to explore the limits between Pacific Northwest dream home and contemporary architecture.

The project is very linked to the environmental conditions of the place. The first homes are located in the city of Bend, east of the Cascades, a strip of territory between the coniferous forests and mountains of the Pacific Northwest and the first foothills of the Great Basin, an arid inland area that runs from southern Idaho to the Mojave Desert.

This dual condition between the views of the mountains and the semi-arid soil marks the entire action, which has to resolve the relationship with a majestic and protected landscape, on the one hand, and the construction of more controlled, domestic exteriors, on the other.

M1 House is basically a floating roof on a series of stepped platforms that follow the natural topography of the land. This simple scheme provides highly varied spatial situations based on slight variations in the level of transparency of the façades, the exterior slope and the position in the sequence of spaces in the house.

The house is organized on a single floor. The presence of a pine tree right in the middle of the lot conditions the different rooms around it, building a continuous ring in which all the spaces of the house are arranged in a continuous sequence. The vegetation completes this interior-exterior diagram that enhances both worlds: the exterior natural space and the domestic and designed courtyard garden.

The house is built using a cross-laminated timber structure based on deep-edged beams that are supported by timber-framed screens placed radially around the perimeter, without touching it. This ensures the “buoyancy” of the roof, which is separated from the facades wrapped in a champagne-toned aluminum composite panel finish.

The exterior is built with traditional wooden framework systems finished in a modified fir wood lath. The floors are made up of a terraced concrete slab under which the main facilities run.