Rock'n'House es la casa familiar que fue construida sobe una roca de más de 12 mil años. Ubicada en las montañas de Catskills al norte de Nueva York y diseñada por el arquitecto Christian Wassmann, Architectural Digest te lleva a conocer cómo es vivir en este espectacular hogar en donde los humanos y la naturaleza pueden coexistir como uno solo.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 (birds chirping)
00:02 The boulder is always present.
00:11 You see it through triple glass that is curved.
00:14 You see it through a round window in the kitchen.
00:17 You are aware of the boulder,
00:19 even in the spaces that don't have direct views
00:22 because the walls are either radial
00:25 or curved around the center of the rock.
00:27 (gentle music)
00:30 Welcome to the Rockin' House
00:35 in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York.
00:38 I designed this and built this
00:46 with the help of local craftspeople
00:48 and it is also my family's home.
00:50 When we found the property,
00:55 this boulder was magically resting
00:57 on the highest spot of the land.
00:59 And we felt this was an invitation
01:03 to design a house right around it.
01:05 That's where everything started.
01:07 We had a compass built and we circled,
01:10 made the first courtyard with a plum,
01:13 a level, and a very long stick.
01:16 (gentle music)
01:18 This house is entirely sustainable.
01:27 It's built out of sustainably harvested wood
01:29 from forests that are certified.
01:32 This is a conical roof clad in solar panels
01:35 and it also produces more energy
01:37 than it will ever consume in the lifespan
01:40 of about 100 to 300 years.
01:42 It harvests all the solar energy
01:45 that we need to run the house
01:47 and it collects also rainwater for a swimming pond.
01:50 Let me show you inside.
02:03 So here we're in the mudroom
02:09 which has seven foot four high ceilings
02:12 and then it slowly gets narrower
02:14 and then it gets wider and wider
02:16 all the way to the main space
02:18 which has in the tip there a 22 foot ceiling.
02:22 The sunken living room was one of these pandemic additions.
02:29 Out of curiosity, I took a pickaxe one night
02:32 and to check how deep the bedrock is
02:34 and found out that it was about four feet.
02:37 This sunken living room has many ways of inhabiting it.
02:41 Here I'm sitting probably the most upright
02:43 and then we have this tetrahedron pillows
02:45 that can serve as headrests.
02:47 There is also the chance that you can go all the way down
02:51 and lay flat onto the bedrock
02:53 and it's a whole different experience
02:55 and actually very cold right now, very comfortable.
02:59 The rock is in the center but in a way
03:05 the geometric center of the house
03:07 that would be pretty much here.
03:10 I think this is very important in this house
03:12 that we wanted to not only make it look in a certain way
03:15 but also function in a perfect way.
03:18 Many moments, many days, many dinner parties
03:21 start on this kitchen island.
03:22 It really is the heart of the house.
03:25 This curved kitchen is built by Jan Kremen,
03:29 a carpenter from the Czech Republic.
03:31 The transition to then a dining
03:34 or a more formal sit down is very fluid.
03:37 It's in the same space.
03:39 The space gets a little taller
03:41 and here we have this rectangular table.
03:43 A custom made fireplace that I designed
03:51 to come straight out of the ceiling.
03:53 This triple glass is the maximum size
04:00 that would fit in an ocean container.
04:02 It came from Germany and it had like an inch on the bottom
04:06 and on the top of the shipping container.
04:09 The rock also has very different personalities.
04:11 When you see it from down here,
04:13 it almost feels like a neck or the kids call it ET
04:17 because ET's face, head looks very much like that.
04:20 In a winter storm it feels you're inside a snow globe
04:25 but also it has a little bit of an aquarium feeling.
04:28 You can experience it very differently
04:29 from one day to another,
04:31 from one moment, from one hour to the next.
04:34 I hope the boulder likes the attention.
04:36 Yeah, I think he was a little lonely for 12,000 years
04:39 till we found him or he found us.
04:42 So it's a glacial erratic that was dropped here
04:45 about 12,000 years ago in the last ice age.
04:48 The way these rocks fell is really how we found it.
04:51 We like living with him
04:53 and I think his trees are growing well,
04:55 his moss is growing, so I think he's a happy boulder.
04:58 This is my home office where I often sit and sketch.
05:01 It also has the model of the house that we built.
05:04 It shows you all the rooms,
05:06 how they relate radial to the rock.
05:09 So with each door to one of the spaces,
05:12 Lorenzo's bedroom, laundry room, powder room,
05:16 guest apartment, Kiki's bedroom,
05:18 each door makes the main space
05:20 where Lorenzo's bedroom is located.
05:23 So it's a very, very special space.
05:25 And with each door to Kiki's bedroom,
05:27 each door makes the main space three feet wider.
05:31 And all the windows that look relatively wild
05:35 have again something to do with the rock.
05:38 We have 64 segments that built this house,
05:42 64 pizza slices as we call them.
05:44 The house is the passstück between you and nature,
05:53 and the windows exactly where they help you
05:56 to inhabit the interior in the most comfortable
05:59 or most exciting way.
06:01 When I sit here on my desk,
06:06 I wanted to have the view through the window
06:08 on my eye level.
06:09 Same in my bedroom,
06:14 we wanted the window very low to the ground
06:17 in order to be able to sit on,
06:18 but also to look outside.
06:21 And that led to a relatively wild layout from the outside
06:25 that only makes sense once you inhabit the building inside.
06:30 All of our projects in one way or another
06:33 start in a sketchbook, models and sketchbooks.
06:37 We're trying not to waste anything.
06:39 So even the kitchen window here,
06:41 which is a round window in the concrete wall,
06:43 became the fire pit of the fireplace.
06:46 This is my daughter's room.
06:50 She has the view from her bed
06:52 out to the east side, sunrise.
06:56 She wanted a big desk,
06:57 which can change as she expands her crafty projects.
07:02 My client, in this case, my daughter,
07:05 was very happy with this design.
07:07 Kiki shares the bathroom with her brother, Lorenzo.
07:13 They also, at some point,
07:14 they were like desiring outdoor shower.
07:17 And so I came up with the idea
07:19 of getting a shower that is draining directly
07:22 into the concrete slab.
07:24 And it has a big window where they can open the window
07:28 and they can shower pretty much with nature outside.
07:33 This is my son, Lorenzo's room.
07:39 He's the lucky one who got a window
07:42 that is large enough that it becomes a door
07:45 so he can eventually escape
07:47 and has his own little private garden out here.
07:50 I wanted to have our bedrooms all facing east,
08:00 so both kids have east exposure and our bedroom.
08:03 And the guest apartment is more northwest facing.
08:07 The bathroom is, again, a relatively compressed space
08:12 compared to the very tall bedroom,
08:14 but then it has a nice little surprise
08:17 that you can look down into the main space.
08:20 You smell the coffee in the morning already.
08:24 You can always call down and be connected
08:26 to the main action in the house.
08:30 (upbeat music)
08:32 We wanted the guests also feel independent from us.
08:53 So it's actually a guest apartment.
08:58 And then we have a built-in couch.
09:01 All these beams were prefabricated and engineered
09:04 to actually build in a sofa
09:06 that takes advantage of the structure itself.
09:09 And it is high enough to be comfortable
09:14 on the dining table.
09:15 This is our Polaris there that also has a handrail
09:23 that points double functioning as a naked eye observatory
09:27 where you see Polaris at night.
09:29 This explains the idea of the stair.
09:36 This is the axis of the earth.
09:39 So it's a 42 degree steep stair with a handrail
09:43 that double functions as a naked eye observatory
09:47 of the North Star.
09:48 This is the guest's bedroom with a king-size bed
09:55 and North exposure and the skylight to the South.
09:59 Here you can stargaze on this Charlotte Perrillon
10:04 and Le Corbusier chaise longue.
10:06 And you can also open it up and look out into the sky.
10:23 (gentle music)
10:26 The roof is cone-shaped.
10:33 We placed the roof in a way that the largest surface
10:36 is exposed around four o'clock,
10:39 the time when the grid is most used.
10:43 So these shingles by SunStyle are three-foot squares.
10:47 They're all overlapping.
10:48 So it forms this kind of dragon scale,
10:51 holds the water out and each one of them
10:54 produces about 80 watts.
10:56 All together we produce 18,000 per year.
10:59 The house uses about 8,000 kilowatt hours.
11:02 So we have 10,000 extra for an electric car
11:05 and the rest we donate to the grid.
11:07 Because we wanted cross ventilation
11:14 to have as much natural air as possible,
11:17 each facade has windows in it.
11:20 (gentle music)
11:23 So to contrast the curtain wall on the south side
11:29 and part of the east,
11:31 we continue with a very traditional barn material,
11:34 board and batten facade.
11:35 You can see already how the color is shifting.
11:38 It's local pine that turns like a silverish gray.
11:41 In my studio, we try to live by this mantra
11:48 that everything that we design
11:50 connects individuals to each other,
11:53 to themselves and then to the cosmos.
11:55 The cosmos can be nature directly around you,
11:59 but it can also be the sun
12:01 and various other star constellations
12:03 and the ocean if there is an ocean
12:06 or in our case here, the rock,
12:08 which is also all stardust in the end.
12:10 Cosmic architecture goes back
12:13 to thousands of years of architecture
12:15 where old temples, even very simple monuments
12:19 were aligned with usually the sun as the strongest force.
12:24 After studying and traveling to many temples and monuments,
12:29 I realized that it was time to incorporate this also
12:34 into more regular architecture.
12:36 So why could it not be in a private house?
12:39 That's the challenge and that's what sets
12:41 some of this cosmic architecture apart
12:44 from non-cosmic architecture,
12:47 that you do have this goal to ultimately connect
12:50 to something larger than what is directly around you.
12:53 If a building can make you aware of this,
12:58 I think it's amazing.
13:00 I certainly am obsessed with geometry.
13:06 We started stacking out the 50 by 50 square
13:09 and the first move was that we actually offset it
13:12 by golden ratios.
13:14 It's the proportion that appears in nature,
13:16 in many plants, but also in the human body.
13:19 As an architect, you're always looking forward.
13:24 You're not just designing for who you are now,
13:27 but you're designing for who you want to become.
13:29 We built this house with the goal
13:35 that it will hold a lifetime,
13:38 maybe the lifetime of my kids
13:40 and hopefully even till the next ice age.
13:43 (gentle music)
13:46 This is the latest edition by my son,
13:49 who turned 12 and he built this tree house
13:51 with his friends.
13:52 I helped them building the zip line
13:54 and tested it also for its safety.
13:56 It should be fine.
13:57 Ready?
14:00 That's my house.
14:12 (gentle music)
14:14 (gentle music)
14:17 (music fades)
14:19 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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