The 23.2 House is a single family house created by Omer Arbel architect sited on a large rural acreage outside Vancouver in the West Coast of Canada. The design of the house itself began, as a point of departure, with a depository of one hundred year old Douglas Fir beams reclaimed from a series of burned down ware- houses. The beams were of different lengths and cross sectional dimensions, and had astonishing proportions – some as long as 20 meters, some as deep as 90 cm. It was agreed that the beams were sacred artefacts in their current state and that they would not manipulate them or finish them in any way.

The architect needed to com- mit to a geometry because the beams were of different lengths and sizes, that would be able to accommodate the tremendous variety in dimension, while still allowing the possibility of narrating legible spaces, settled on a triangular geometry. Wood triangular frames folds made of the reclaimed beams to create roof which would act as a secondary and habitable landscape, draping this artificial landscape over the gentle slope of the site. Folds were manipulated to create implicit and explicit- it relationships between indoor and outdoor space, such that every interior room had a corresponding exterior room.

To maximize ambiguity between interior and exterior space, the architects removed definition of one significant corner of each room by pulling the structure back from the corner it- self, using bent steel columns. Also large accordion door systems were introduced in these open corners so that the entire façade on both sides of each significant corner could retract and completely disappear.

Architects: Omer Arbel

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