Architecture News Plus (ANP) – Architecture and Design Magazine

Agosta House

This is a project by Patkau Architects and it is located at San Juan Island, Washington, United States. Project's program: Single family house. There are twenty images for Agosta House.

: © James Dow/Patkau Architects

Project details

Project name: Agosta House
Location: San Juan Island, Washington, United States
Program: Single family house
Area: Built-up area: 258 m2
Year: Project year: 1997-2000
Project by: Patkau Architects
Team: Design team: John Patkau, Patricia Patkau, David Shone
Others: Structural Engineer: Fast + Epp Structural Engineers • General Contractor: Ravenhill Construction

Project images

Designer's statement

The Agosta house sits in a grassy meadow enclosed on three sides by forty-three acres of second-growth Douglas fir forest. The fourth side of the meadow opens to the northwest, where it overlooks rolling fields and, across Haro Strait in the distance, the Gulf Islands of British Columbia. The house includes a separate structure with an office and guest quarters and also a vegetable and flower garden, which is protected from the numerous deer on San Juan Island by a twelve-foot fence.

The structure, which spans the ridge of the meadow, forms a “dam” that divides the site. An enclosed forecourt to the south-east suggests a spatial reservoir to be released through the house; a panoramic view to the north-west becomes a spatial sea of picturesque fields and waterways.

In section, walls and roof are sloped to respond to the gentle but steady incline of the site. The organization of the house is the result of extruding and then manipulating this section, either by erosion, which produces exterior inbetween spaces that divide the house programmatically, or by insertion, which uses ceiling bulkheads to separate the programmatic areas created by the exterior in-between spaces into more finely scaled interior areas.

The construction of the house is simple in concept—a wood frame on a concrete slab. It is intended to have the direct quality of a rural or even agricultural building. In execution, the construction is somewhat more sophisticated. The structure is a combination of exposed heavy timber framing and conventional stud framing; the interior is clad in white-painted gypsum board. Radiant heating is embedded in the simple concrete slab foundation. Most exterior surfaces are clad in light-gauge galvanized sheet steel, which protects the structure not only from the weather but from forest wildfires.