precedent 03 - Loblolly House

One thing that's interesting about our house is that light can show up anywhere, different places at different times of the year. Because the interior is quite open, and because virtually all the windows face sun south. The clerestory windows are magical in this way. Because they are high and span the house and catch the sun differently with the seasons.

Here is an example: So I'm standing in [the kids' bathroom with no windows and the door open when] I notice this blazing patch of light as big as my two hands on the wall in front of me. I look over my left shoulder to see where it's coming from...I see that the late winter morning sun has just reached the lower corner of the first clerestory window. A laser across our interior space. I recall that in early spring, sunlight will shoot at mid-day from those top windows all the way to the back wall of the house. Light shaft to the back of the dark chamber, same as the burial mounds around Stonehenge.

from an email from Dad, 03.14.2009


It's not just the presence of light in the house, it's the quality. The house glows. The open space of the property and Carmen's green or golden field to the west provide a quality that needs to be harnessed, filtered, absorbed, etc. Appreciated. I can see why my dad chose to build how he did.This light quality was what I wanted to explore in this post. Dad's email seemed to dovetail perfectly into the next precedent house I wished to examine (click on any of the images to go to my picasa/loblolly image gallery).



The Loblolly House by KieranTimberlake is a Maryland house, taking many of the same local qualities into consideration. Loblolly is on Taylors Island, on the edge of a loblolly pine forest, with only a hundred yards or so of saltmeadow between it and the Chesapeake Bay. What drew me to Loblolly House, besides the location, was the vertical wood rainscreen on three sides; the elevations viewed from the pine forest. The concept was for these sides of the house to emulate the quality of the trees - light, shadow, striation, verticality - from the trees. The long west facade opens completely to the Bay and the setting sun. Loblolly House was conceived as a treehouse, a platform in the trees, or a duck blind, masked on three sides but with an open, focused front. The house rests lightly on wood piles driven into the sand.




While reading about the house, I learned that just as relevant of a concept as the open facades, the house was prefabricated primarily off-site and brought on-site in pieces (cartridges) which were then assembled in just 6 weeks. It is actually best explained by the architect (and owner) Stephen Kieran in a ten minute video interview and tour of the house by Ultimate House tv. Kieran describes the time and cost saving benefits of prefab, how Loblolly differs from modular homes of the past, as well as the house's other features: the rainscreen, folding doors, and green (color) bamboo floors.

While this post merely introduces the idea of quality of light and the Loblolly house, I'll discuss the topic further and what we can draw from Loblolly as either an edit to this post or in the next post.

GIMMEESHELTER!