Sometimes the Internet brings us great surprises. We’ve been recently contacted by some students from the U.S. (Bernabe Longoria, from the University of Texas at Arlington, U.T.A. and Fabiola Miria, Brigid Hardiman and Shih-hsun Lin, from New York Institute of Technology) regarding the same project: the House of Steel and Wood in Ranón.
As there isn’t much information about this building around the net (in fact I just realized it isn’t even published here), they asked us to send them the plans. The surprise came when, some weeks later, Bernabe contacted us back and sent us some photos of a nice scale model he had made using that technical information. Here you can see them:
Nice, isn’t it? It’s even more detailed than Ecosistema’s own models! And Bernabe also wrote us some words:
Dear Ecosistema Urbano,
My name is Bernabe Josue Longoria and I am a student at the University of Texas at Arlington [also, he tells us he was born February 8, 1990, raised in the small town of Cleburne, Texas]. This is currently the beginning of my junior year in the architecture program and the first assignment given to us was to study a small, residential, prefabricated house of our choosing. After spending a few days going through books in our library and houses online, I finally stumbled upon the House of Steel and Wood.
The organic simplicity of this design was what impacted me most, along with the spaces themselves. Nothing interrupts them, which allows anyone to not only enjoy the company of their own family and friends, but the beautiful surroundings in the area.
Being from Texas, everything must be expensive, everything must be better than “that design”, above all, everything must be bigger. As a student the fame, fortune, and idea of my name becoming a generic stamp on a building has never been something important to me. What I aim for in this career is clearly what this house displayed; to impact the world itself without leaving a mark. I find it very interesting that you are able to design with not only a limited amount of space but materials as well. I have never been taught to design at this scale or style, so this was a whole new experience for me seeing as how The House of Steel and Wood was my first precedence of this type of architecture. I hope to pull from this experience the concept of making a feasible, discrete, and sustainable designs for the earth and by the earth; therefore offering a design to the world without taking away from its natural beauty.
Many thanks to Bernabe for sharing his work with us! And there’s even more: Fabiola, Brigid and Shih-hsun are right now working on a BIM model of the same house; here at the office we are all eager to see the result.
This kind of interactions make us even more aware of the importance of sharing information about each one’s projects and creations. Right now, everyone can already download the Air Tree project or, just for fun, get the CAD files for EU Comics, but there is still a long long way to go: could we publish every project the same way?
