Allandale House: A Cabin of Curiosities cranks the A-Frame

Young American architect William O'Brien Jr. has dabbled with the triangular section to great effect, and challenging scale.

The A-Frame holds a certain place in New Zealand architecture, commonly deployed in bach or chalet construction as well as a few alternatives -I seem to recall spotting a few A-Frame chapels in the countryside- but in recent memory it hasn't really been popular -or at least not to the editorial tastes of our local magazines.

The Allandale House has attracted the attention of the blogosphere in the last few days, and I couldn't help pass it on, with a few New Zealandish thoughts of my own.

Designed by O'Brien Jr. and Bhujon Kang (on the project team), and wonderfully visualised by Peter Guthrie, the house is designed for a family as a holiday home -is the A-Frame a holiday typology?- and is apparently a "small" vacation house, which in particular has to store and display a curious collection of artifacts. The planning conforms to a linear progression from garage and library, to bedrooms and bathrooms (in the second and central two-storey frame) and the third frame is programmed with a kitchen, dining and living area -including the spectacular triangular framed view.

Some formal studies which develop the axial allignments of the 3 A-Frames.

Site to Building progression -entrance from left.

Visible here is the subtly curved surface transferring to the tilted wall, and of course the stunning triangular framed view.

A brief line from the design team which introduces the attractive detailing of the floor-wall connection: "The house aims to undermine the seeming limitations of a triangular section. It is done with the increase to extreme proportion in the vertical direction and the use of the acute corners meeting the floor as thickening of the walls, telescopic apertures and built-in storage."

The thickened wall-floor detail with embedded storage and deep window.

The transverse sections.

I find the interior view of the thickened wall to be very attractive, it obviously makes the wall more approachable (diagrammed in the section) with its sphere of space, and there's something very intimate about such a short vertical surface. It also appears to be a curved transition to tilted element -an aesthetic taste in softened corners I've probably acquired from early Athfield projects.

As I've alluded too, I think the scale of this A-Frame is challenging to my experiences of much smaller versions of the typology in New Zealand. Aside from a comment that this place looks massive anyhow in terms of planning, I think the images we see here are very compelling, and I would love to see more work being done on the typology, can it be scaled? Are there more elegant ways to detail the floor-wall meeting? How do you move vertically? How do you truncate the extrusion? If you have some thoughts on this, or better yet some projects, I would love to see them and open a discussion on some of these issues.