“Local patron Sonia Dhillon-Marty invites teams made up of Stanford students and professional architects to her property, Champ de Portola, for a two-day design charrette and competition. The winning design will be built on her property by 2014.

This experimental learning project proposed by Dhillon-Marty and the Dhillon Marty Foundation is a collaboration with the Stanford Architectural Design Program and the Stanford Arts Institute. The objective is to arrive at a design, or set of designs, that pushes the ideas of architecture and construction – and ultimately leads to a finished product.

Participating architects from the United States are Kevin Daly of Daly Genik, Erin Moore of the University of Oregon, Larry Booth of Booth Hansen, Antonio Caliz of Valerio Dewalt Train Associates and Charles Debbas of Debbas Architecture. Architects from abroad are Takato Tamagami of Takato Tamagami Architectural Design and Nihon University in Japan; Ko Nakamura of Mosaic Design and Kengo Kuma Lab at Tokyo University in Japan; Yao Chen, a doctoral candidate at the Kengo Kuma Lab from China; and Aris Kafantaris, a graduate student at the Kengo Kuma Lab from Greece.” From press release 10/23/12

A tiny second floor for a tiny tidewater log cabin in Southeast Alaska. It’s not really about being indoors here but if you do want to sit by the window, you will surely see whales. Biggest challenge–planning for cleaning salt and gook from the outside of the upper window. Best quote from owner’s house guest–”this room is like the Discovery Channel!” (referring to those whales and other creatures viewed from upper room).

This project is a small off-grid retreat on a rural site in Bordeaux, France. A steel exoskeleton supports a polycarbonate roof over a 120 sq. ft. wood framed interior box. Window locations are located to emphasize foreground and background views and the butterfly roof funnels rain water to a cistern that provides habitat for the namesake native tree frog.

What does it mean to account for the entire lifecycle of a building? In my design practice, this means assigning an intentional lifespan to different parts of the building. In a studio I have just designed for a client’s family property in Bordeaux, France, the foundation of the building will be there longer than the nearby Roman road markers. Rendered as topography, the foundation is designed to be beautiful and useful regardless of whether the rest of the building still stands. A steel frame that is bolted together on site will support the enclosure and the studio will be enclosed with cedar slat panels that fit into the frame with nearly no fasteners. In time, these more ephemeral parts of the building will come apart into neat piles of cedar and steel, ready for their next lives.

In the meantime, I intend for the lightweight structure to appear to shift a bit on its moorings in response to time and the elements. In the way that it shapes the relationship between the owner and his country property, I am intend for the studio to draw attention to the short term of his stewardship and to the long term of the place. The way that I think about my design practice—FLOAT architectural research and design—is also meant to reflect this astatic permanence as in the way that a well-moored boat swings wide on its anchor line.

Architecture Houses Now! 2, Philip Jodidio (NY: Taschen, 2011)

New Prefab, Sergio Costa (Barcelona: Loft, 2008)

Tiny Houses, Mimi Zeiger (NY: Rizzoli, 2009)