Boulder House

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  • 2020

  • Architectural
    Architectual Design

Designed By:

Commissioned By:

Confidential

Designed In:

Korea, Republic of

In the paradoxical process of designing a home in an area where privacy is very unfavourable for a client whose privacy is very important, the building becomes a very unique feature that is not usually seen.


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Image: Namgoong Sun
Image: Namgoong Sun
Image: Namgoong Sun
Image: Namgoong Sun
Image: Namgoong Sun
Image: Namgoong Sun
Image: Namgoong Sun
Image: Namgoong Sun
Image: Namgoong Sun
  • CHALLENGE
  • SOLUTION
  • IMPACT
  • MORE
  • Boulder House is a residential house for a client who puts privacy first in an area where securing privacy is difficult. To secure privacy, the architect minimized windows except the direction to the garden in the east, and due to this, the building couldn’t have avoided looking especially massive. To make this rarely-seen characteristic of the building stand out, the architect planned it to look like one gigantic boulder. The architect took great pains in the selection of exterior finishing materials and construction methods to make the building look like one gigantic boulder, and the result is the boulder-looking house.

  • The reason why the stone's pattern of Boulder House was important was because we wanted the building to look like one gigantic boulder. If you attach stone with irregular patterns in regular construction grids, you absolutely cannot make it look like one boulder because of its broken pattern. The matching direction between the patterns of the stone and the construction joints minimizes the sense of difference between these two and helps people to recognize the horizontal layer in different scales depending on the distance viewing the building from.

  • We have a lot to talk about the Boulder House, such as the good residential space and high-quality details for the concept, but these are good things, not new. But the use of the stone material is clearly new interpretation of the application of stone material, and we did achieve a result appropriate to the application, so we can say that the value of the project is meaningful.

  • Just using stone as the exterior material does not mean the architect can deliver the massive weight we feel from a gigantic boulder. Unfortunately, unlike a natural boulder, the stones used in buildings are divided and repeated for construction, which distorts the unique pattern and scale of the stones. The architect chose an Italian quartzite, which has a soft and uniform horizontal layer that looks like sedimentary rocks. And he cut the stone thin and long to match stone with horizontal layers. By matching the stone pattern and the construction joint in parallel, observers can see horizontal layers of different scales depending on how far from they look at the building. At a close distance, the horizontal pattern of the stones is visible, and at a far distance, the horizontal construction joint looks like a natural pattern of stone, making the building look like a large mass of a boulder.