Drawings: Max Cabber, Designco
Contractor: David Benakis, D.M.B. Enterprises Inc.
To obtain a building permit as soon as possible and proceed with experimentation without delay, I decided to build the main house in a conventional manner. The floor plan of the residence takes up the maximum area within the parameters of the largest boulders. Attempts to raise a roof over a plan with eight corners proved to be very complicated, costly, and impossible without support posts, which would disrupt the openness of the interior space. A flat roof was the solution, and the model evolved by raising walls straight up from the floor plan. Thus in designing the exterior of the house I had only the parapets to play with. The red lines in the model correspond to the dark lines in the elevation drawings, both representing the edges of parapets capped with U-shaped pre-oxidized copper. The walls will be of moss-green stucco, the color of the surrounding juniper trees. Ground breaking is scheduled for early March, completion expected in 4 to 5 months.
Progress in building the main house will not be updated until the house is completed.
Once I move into the new building, the shell dwellings will be built as planned.
Drawings: Max Cabber, Designco
Contractor: David Benakis, D.M.B. Enterprises Inc.
EXPERIMENTS WITH HONEYCOMB had to be delayed in order to obtain a building permit as soon as possible, and attention was concentrated on designing and detailing the main residence. Nevertheless, some experimentation was done using chicken wire to create a curved surface and industrial polyurethane foam as filler & glue to layers of paper honeycomb sheets with 1/2" openings. Much was learned in the process, and since several different approaches suggest themselves, all possibilities will be explored.
Now that the building permit has been obtained, the guest house and the kitchen will have to wait until the main house is completed. Experimentation shall proceed without delay, and since Kirk Cobb, an experienced and inventive builder, has joined me in this venture, I am confident that a satisfactory solution shall be reached. The entire process will be photographed and described, showing how a composite shell was developed and why certain procedures were not acceptable.
Costs permitting, the cabled roof section, originally designed for the main house, will be built as a free-standing garage.
  July 2002 |