The client, an architect by training and a video game designer by profession, came to us with the vision of exposing the geology of the site through inhabiting an abstraction of an ‘erratic’.
Erratics are boulders often quite large that are transported and deposited by glaciation. Additionally, he and his partner desired a house composed of long-lasting materials containing viewing apertures specific to its place. Inspired by conceptual earth artist and their quest for expressing ancient relationships of site and space, our studio explored architecturally linking geologic processes, the passage of time, and the site as it exists today.
The existing site and immediate area were principally formed by the meeting of two distinct areas of the North American continent: The Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. The oldest rocks in this area date to 1.7 billion years before present.
600 million years ago, a shallow ocean flooded the site and for most of the next 300 million years, a geological cycle progressed: sea bed sedimentation interrupted by dramatic uplift events and then erosion periodically aided by glaciation.
Humans often find it difficult to conceive much less understand events that transpired millennia ago. In this house we interrogated revealing the deep time of the site in relation to the immediate present.