The Fire Lookout House, California Home Design, American Concept Architecture, Images
The Fire Lookout House in California
Concept Property in CA, United States ? design By Paul Michael Davis Architects
Sep 20, 2017
The Fire Lookout House
Design: Paul Michael Davis Architects
Location: Southern California, USA
The Fire Lookout House

This is a study of a house in its true context, instead of its idealized context?real nature instead of romantic nature.

It is a conceptual project that started out as a real one. A great client in California found our Seattle firm online, and hired us to design him a new house to replace one that had burned down in one of the increasingly frequent wildfires here in the West.
When our client tragically passed away, we were left with a project we loved which would never get built. We decided not to quit the project. Released from the need to sell our ideas to a real client, we decided to treat the house as a laboratory to study ideas about building in places where wildfire is a part of the intersection of nature and the built environment, as well as honor the memory of our client?s dreams.

The house is a long bar floating over a steep mountain foothill. A solid, concrete end of the bar containing private and service spaces is buried in the hillside. At the other end, a cantilevered glass living space dissolves above a hazy valley below. We brought light into the buried portion of the house with scoops into the roof and hillside. A...