Reach Forth - Into the Sun + Rain
In the small but wonderful book “The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses” architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa speaks of architecture as ‘an extension of nature into the man-made realm, providing the ground for perception and the horizon of experiencing and understanding the world’.
He also makes the point that this ‘is not an isolated and self-sufficient artefact; it directs our attention and existential experience to wider horizons’.
To put it another way - Architecture has the power to open up our experience of the world.
In our recent work; Portal House, a single storey linear home, positioned on a hill overlooking the Irish Sea in West Wales. The site provides a perfect setting for a separate ancillary building - A Storm Shelter. It is within this small typology we have been exploring critical ideas on the phenomenology of forces.
More and more in our work, the feeling of primordial shelter seeps in to heighten lived experience. These raw encounters with ‘mother nature’ are something we are deeply interested in, and believe essential in re-orientating ourselves back to nature.
These natural forces found in winter storms and summer sun are all easily overlooked. Yet within the framework of architecture, these immense phenomena can be captured and become some of the richest experiences as we play out our lives under this firmament.
Our Storm Shelter offers up a platform, suspended and immersed amongst the beauty of it all. Clad in metal shrouds of linear form that shield us from the piercing rain. With eyes closed accompanied by a feeling of comfort, we listen to the thunderous dance of distant storms.
Here we have developed an architectural language that attempts a structural poetic clarity that is in unison with natural forces. It does this by offering up an effortless cantilever that reaches forth towards the sun and into our dreams.
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