Today Architectural Digest travels to the Vancouver countryside to tour the 75.9 House. Designed by Omer Arbel, this unique structure got its name from being the 9th iteration of the 75th idea they authored in their studio. Omer’s design plays with the idea of creating future ancient structures using concrete in a soft, fluid way, letting the material dictate its form. Impressive tree-like pillars flow through the space giving the appearance of ‘found’ ruins. Join Omer for an in-depth look at the creative process and philosophy behind this unique structure.
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00:00It just occurred to me that the forms that these materials might suggest to us might
00:11be much more exciting and radical than anything we could come up with ourselves.
00:16Any particular material will suggest a completely different world of form if you really listen.
00:22And to me that seemed worthwhile.
00:26It seemed like something worth devoting a lifetime to.
00:35My name is Omer Arbel and I designed the 75.9 house.
00:39This house is called 75.9 because it's the ninth iteration of the 75th idea that we've
00:46authored in our studio.
00:47We have a general philosophy in the studio which is that form should be born of a material's
00:53intrinsic properties, glass, wood, and in this case concrete.
00:57And so when our clients approached us, I said that that's what I wanted to do.
01:01I wanted to explore the sculptural potential of concrete in this kind of unpredictable
01:06way.
01:07In other words, to set in motion a way of making that we author without predicting what
01:14it might look like when finished.
01:17So I think it's kind of amazing that they went for it because it's such a huge amount
01:22of risk.
01:25We've always had a critique of contemporary concrete construction, which is that it's
01:29a fluid, dynamic material.
01:31But those attributes of the material are never acknowledged in the finished forms that you
01:37see people making out of concrete.
01:39And we've been doing that at the scale of an object for many years.
01:42To bring that philosophy into the scale of architecture has been quite a challenge, but
01:47also just an amazing opportunity.
01:49It's almost like living with a very eccentric roommate or something like that, like to try
01:52to make something that's not necessarily comfortable coexist within a comfortable home environment
01:58for a family.
01:59I thought that could make an exciting premise for architecture.
02:13In Vancouver, it rains eight months of the year.
02:15It's really rainy.
02:16So we thought the experience of entry could be really wonderful if it was very lush.
02:21So the idea of what we're calling the winter garden is that it's very, very overgrown.
02:26You see it here in its infancy.
02:28That's sort of one idea about it.
02:29And the other one is that these things are not that far from being lily pads themselves.
02:34Above us is the first lily pad.
02:36And what you're looking at here is the dining room.
02:39So what you'll notice is that we've changed height.
02:41It sort of explodes as soon as you enter, and then it intentionally gets low over the
02:47dining table.
02:48So that feeling of expanding and then contracting gives you an intimate feeling of the space,
02:54but also totally focused on the field.
02:57You're seated.
02:58You have this like very heavy thing above you, but your experience is thrown out into
03:03the sunset.
03:04We thought of forming it using fabrics.
03:12I'm not the first to explore this, but this is probably the first time the technique of
03:18fabric forming was explored at scale.
03:20It's almost like a reverse tent structure, if you think of it.
03:23There are stiff parts, like the tent poles, if you use that analogy, and then there's
03:27the soft parts, which are the fabric.
03:29And our role was to sculpt the form such that it could, on the one hand, attain all these
03:35technical requirements that we had to respond to, but also to keep the process open-ended
03:40enough to surprise us, so that the form really responded to what the material wanted to do,
03:45not necessarily what we wanted it to do.
03:48One of the innovations of the method that we developed, and this came from our structural
03:51engineers, was to concoct the recipe for the concrete such that its rate of curing
03:59followed the rate of pouring the concrete very closely.
04:04These took like 12 hours to pour, or something like that, on the one hand, and then have
04:09the speed of curing closely match that rate of pouring, such that the pieces attain structural
04:15integrity as the pour is happening.
04:19And also, it allowed us to really trust the fabric formwork, because you can imagine that
04:24a lot of the hydrostatic tension no longer had to all fall on the one part of the stem
04:30that's closest to the ground, but was rather distributed over the entire length of the piece.
04:37One of the things I love and didn't really anticipate was the juxtaposition of, on the
04:43one hand, the weight of the concrete, something feeling so massive, especially above us, and
04:48on the other hand, something kind of pillowy and soft.
04:52I like to play with this idea of compression and expansion.
04:56So we have just been compressed in the dining room, and then we make our way to the living
05:01room and the space expands above us, again, sort of like in the direction of the westerly
05:06facing field.
05:07And so the sunset's very strong in this room, and you have a contrast between the height
05:12on the one hand and the horizontality of the site on the other.
05:19Given that these concrete pieces are so brutal and possibly uncomfortable, I felt that the
05:26contrast needed to be warmth, and that's why we really wanted oak.
05:30And I think that without the wood, it might make for an amazing cultural space or something
05:36like that, but as a home, it needed something to anchor it back into an experience that
05:41humans identify as comfortable.
05:49The sunsets over the fields are just sublime experiences.
05:53And so to orient most of the spaces such that they capture that magical west light and such
06:00that the windows could really sort of, almost as if you were in a ship and you were sort
06:04of seeing the horizon over the ocean, felt like the most poetic response to this site
06:10that I could come up with.
06:19And then east light, we treat it as a mysterious thing.
06:23It appears almost in all the spaces, but in a mysterious way and not directly.
06:27It's filtered, it comes in ambient.
06:30So that again is a contrast.
06:36I'm the creative director of a company called Bocce, and we make predominantly lighting.
06:41I made these sort of clouds, cloud forms.
06:44This particular piece is called 100, and it was new when this house was starting to
06:48come to the later stages of the construction project.
06:51And our clients fell in love with them.
06:53So my role was simply to compose how they might interact with the spaces.
06:57And in general, I like seeing lighting as a way to experience volumes that you can't
07:03really occupy with your body.
07:07Here we can see another intention, which I had in the scenario of a gathering or a party.
07:12There would be people down here in the living room, but also up there in the outdoor dining room.
07:16So there is that idea of a second topography.
07:19And you're always passing sort of under or over the concrete lily pads.
07:27So we began by making small castings this big and then larger and larger, trying to
07:32prove the method.
07:34But what we learned very quickly is it doesn't really scale up.
07:37And so really the only way to do it is to try it at scale.
07:40And that was a kind of amazing thing to discover is you can't really prepare.
07:44And one of the ways that we navigated that, let's call it trepidation, was to say, OK,
07:50let's just make one lily pad, a small one, and see how it goes.
07:55And so we made a small one, a five meter tall one, and it was successful.
07:59Everybody sort of believed in the idea after that.
08:06Our builder was fearless.
08:07And can you imagine just pouring all that concrete into basically a tent structure and
08:11just hoping for the best?
08:13It's like it's wild.
08:14That's courage.
08:24This is the primary bedroom that opens out to the west to the field.
08:29Right beyond here is the first concrete piece we made.
08:33It has a more awkward quality to it.
08:36And it's heavier and it's more stretched out in its proportions.
08:41And it's beautiful because it's what proved that the method works.
08:45Now it's just part of the house.
08:47I wanted a more intimately scaled concrete piece in the place where you experience water.
08:52The quality of water and the liquid nature of these concrete works seemed compatible.
08:59We are in an outdoor zone right next to the primary bedroom,
09:04because this is very private.
09:06It doesn't seem private, but it really is because you're surrounded by a field.
09:10The main shower is an outdoor shower.
09:12And the idea here was we just tugged on the fabric a little bit to make that spout.
09:17And so the water falls from that little protrusion above.
09:21To bring in light into the buried portions of the house,
09:25we needed to sort of carve out these curved shapes.
09:29And so because it's a retaining wall, it made sense to build it out of concrete.
09:33And because we had developed this method, we thought to apply it to the surface of a wall.
09:38The pillowed surface is a direct consequence of the hydrostatic pressure of the concrete.
09:42So wherever you have one of these, you have the plywood rib.
09:45And then fabric is draped here.
09:48And as the concrete fills up, it pushes out and makes these sort of swells, pillow-like forms.
09:58A device that I used compositionally throughout the work
10:02was this idea that the concrete works were found objects.
10:07And they are not found. We made them.
10:09But it was a useful mental device to compose with.
10:14As if it were ruins of a 5,000-year-old structure that were discovered here.
10:19And then our role was to sort of encase them or exhibit them
10:24with the tools of contemporary architecture at our disposal.
10:29This idea of modernist forms or containers for the lily pads to inhabit
10:35again made sense to make them feel warm.
10:38We clad them in wood, but that also should suggest or hint at what's happening inside.
10:43We, in a very compositional, deliberate way, carved out window openings into those volumes.
10:49Through those, you see the concrete forms.
10:52In the sort of cropped way, the same way you might crop a work of art or a photograph.
11:03The horizon is aggressive and relentless.
11:06And the sunset makes it even more sublime, but intense.
11:10And we felt like topography would modulate that experience
11:14and make it kind of rich, but not too aggressive.
11:18We draped the field over the house,
11:20which meant that there are these hills that berm over certain rooms.
11:24In this particular case, it's the corridor. Over there is the primary bedroom.
11:28And bringing light into those rooms required us to come up with some sort of method or device.
11:34We did it by carving out these essentially light wells that could also be inhabited.
11:40So each one is a little courtyard,
11:43introducing an outdoor space that has intimacy and dimension
11:47and an otherwise vast and relentless horizon.
11:56The concrete lily pads are hollow because they are effectively planters
12:01of gigantic, mature trees on the roof, or what will become gigantic trees.
12:05And so all that drainage from these enormous planters has to pass through these stems.
12:10And that means that they have to be hollow.
12:20It's a surreal moment to have trees floating.
12:22It doesn't register that as logical in our minds. It's a dreamscape.
12:26I like inviting these moments of surrealism into the project,
12:30which you maybe don't even realize you're experiencing,
12:33but they give the experience of inhabitation a dreamlike quality.
12:44We have climbed up the stairs, and now we're looking at the downstairs.
12:49So the two large pieces on both sides of the dining room are bathed in south light.
12:55You can see that there's a skylight surrounding three of the four faces.
12:59And the intent there is to make them feel like they're kind of floating
13:03and surrounded with a halo of sky.
13:09We are on top of the dining room lily pads.
13:11So this is the outdoor dining room.
13:13Imagine, in your mind's eye, this tree 30 years from now, much bigger and fuller.
13:18So here we see the intention of having this sort of secondary landscape.
13:22This is cedar, which is a material that's associated with this region.
13:26And it has the nice quality of silvering over time,
13:30which we thought was very beautiful when considered against the texture
13:34of the grey concrete and the grey clouds of Vancouver.
13:48We live in a world of one-size-fits-all solutions.
13:51We wear the same clothes, listen to the same music, and eat the same food.
13:54And it's like, what if we developed forms that can't be repeated?
13:58These forms, if we were to repeat exactly the same process,
14:01would yield different results in another site.
14:04I find that interesting. I think that's meaningful.