The next few days offer your last chance of seeing the House for an Ecologist exhibit at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, on display through May 5.
In conjunction with a sustainability retreat held last May, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) posed this design challenge to national contestants. Participants were asked to design a house for a single ecologist working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in rural West Virginia. Entrants were asked to forge a creative marriage between environmental and design constraints, allowing form to march in step with function. The judging considered "design excellence" along with "celebration of place" and "conservation of resources."
The most intriguing design, Eskin House, was created by James Bowen and Mark Weston of Bowen Architecture. While other proposals integrated existing sustainability methods, such as passive solar and prefabrication, Eskin's design eschewed tradition by making the design of the structure subordinate to environmental concerns. The house (if you can even call it that) is merely a one-room structure hanging from a local bridge. According to a judge
We all gravitated to this project because it rejected the site, it rejected the notion of what 'House' really is, and said an ecologist really only needs a place to bed down for the night, and a place to go to the bathroom, maybe take a shower, heat up some water. It takes a parasitic approach to an existing structure. It made a decision to not build, which would disrupt the surrounding forest. The unique characteristic of this project is the simple rejection of the design problem. It was the most provocative of the submissions…
A quick viewing of the design board shows exactly what inspired the judge's imagination. The designers' creative eccentricity is captured well in their own description of the entry, "A cocoon, a web, a blister in the sun…"
If you can't make it to the actual exhibit, a summary of the contest and winning entries can be viewed on the AIA website.
