The Jellyfish House, a recent project by San Francisco's IwamotoScott Architecture, has been "modeled on the idea that, like the sea creature, it coexists with its environment."
As such, the entirety of the Jellyfish House is designed to operate "as a mutable layered skin, or 'deep surface', that mediates internal and external environments."
What this means is the external surface of the building – the combined expanse of its outer walls and roof – is actually a complicated "water filtration system," operating across and throughout the very structure of the house.
The outer surface, then, is partially porous; it forms what the architects call a "water jacket," featuring "quilted baffles," into which water can flow and where that water can be treated and cleansed.
Rainfall, for instance, enters into the outer layers of the "water jacket" where it is treated with UV light; domestic greywater can be drained into similar mechanisms, built directly into the home's interior, architecturally incorporated into the design.
In the architects' own words, the Jellyfish House "captures, stores and filters rain and gray water for use in the home. For the water filtration system, the exterior surface geometry directs rainwater from the roof, and stores it below grade for future use. The water is filtered through cavities in the skin coated with titanium dioxide and exposed to ultraviolet light."
Wonderfully, that same UV treatment, occurring inside the walls of the house, has an aesthetic effect: as a jellyfish can be bioluminescent, so can the Jellyfish House become "a softly glowing structure," its outer walls shining with the blue light of near-continuous water filtration.
The "external environment" of the house, meanwhile, is particularly interesting.
The proposed site for IwamotoScott's Jellyfish House is actually an artificial island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. That island once served as a military base – which means there is a deep legacy of "toxic soil" to clean-up or remediate:
Specifically, it is sited on Treasure Island, a flat, artificial island built off the naturally occurring island of Yerba Buena in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. Treasure Island is at once local and distant, isolated and connected. It has recently been decommissioned by the military, and is being redeveloped largely for new residences. Like many former military bases, Treasure Island suffers from a range of environmental hazards. The most geographically desirable parts of the island have toxic soil that requires remediation. In these areas, the particular hazardous materials necessitate that up to five feet of topsoil be removed for cleansing. In other areas, the contaminated soil can be treated on site using plant based phyto-remediation techniques.
Of course, that island is also very close to sea level, and, in this era of climate change and coastal landscape transformation, Treasure Island could very well see itself at least partially underwater.
In a way that could perhaps use a bit more explanation from the architects, the landscaping of the site itself – using "sinuous fields of wetlands" – combined with the mechanics of water filtration built directly into the house, could help mitigate the encroaching seas... but I'm a tad unclear about how that would actually happen. There's even a chance that I might simply be projecting my own wishes onto the design.
Could the Jellyfish House possibly float, for instance...? If so, could a whole fleet of Jellyfish Houses – after all, the real idea here is to build several dozen of the structures, each with a unique plan and footprint – leave Treasure Island altogether to prowl the waters of San Francisco Bay, leaving currents of fresh water behind...? A whole new model opens up here: the mobile, sea-borne, inhabitable water filtration plant.
In any case, the Jellyfish House is a very well thought-out and exciting project, and these relatively minor instances of conceptual inexactitude hardly sink the whole thing.
There are some flaws, of course – most notably with the interior.
As it currently appears, in the available renderings, the inside of the Jellyfish House is an almost uninhabitably sterile terrain of white sloping floors and curved walls, complete with pinched hallways and tight openings that lead from room to room.
I can't help but wonder, seeing these interiors, whether some plain old rectilinearity – with vertical walls you can hang pictures on, and rooms laid out to permit rugs and couches – might be a much better idea. The water filtration system is so ingenious, for instance, and even visually exciting, not to mention ecologically beneficial, that to limit its appeal to those families with a taste for the avant-garde seems like a huge mistake.
To put this another way: in an ideal world, these embedded – or ambient – technologies would simply form an unseen and, frankly, unnoticed infrastructural backdrop for mundane familial activities, without requiring homeowners to adopt aesthetically Modern lifestyles.
So if we could separate the technology from the style, perhaps we'd also find that high-tech greywater treatment systems and rainwater capture "jackets" begin to appear in houses all over the world.
In which case, the Jellyfish House will have served as a worthy and exciting model.
IwamotoScott's Jellyfish House, meanwhile, will be on display for the next few months at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, as part of their "Open House: Architecture and Technologies for Intelligent Living" exhibition.
There, you can also catch a number of other exciting architectural projects, including the absurdly great Mix House, by Joel Sanders Architect et al. So if you're anywhere near Los Angeles, consider stopping by.
