Salt House by Alison Brooks Architects

Alison Brooks Architects wins the RIBA Manser Medal with the “Salt House” for The Salt House in Essex.

The Salt House is a beach house at the end of a row of timber-boarded fishermen’s houses overlooking the sea. Constructed as a weekend retreat and future home to retire for the owners, Salt House carries forward the Modernist tradition of the experimental ‘beach house’ as a vehicle to explore new architectural possibilities- site specific yet containing the potential for wider application.

The form and geometry of the house re-interprets the local vernacular of hipped roof, bay windowed cottages. The facade ‘bends’ so that the entire north and south facing facades effectively become ‘bay windows’, maximizing sea views to the north and passive solar gain from the south. The manipulation of the facades in turn deflects the geometry of the hipped roof to create an irregular, crystalline form. The three dimensional facade acts as an instrument for engaging with the communal garden, the land and seascape, while expressing the dynamic forces of the extreme North Sea weather.

The house is based on the structural principle of an elevated slab as the base for a steel portal frame. This allows two stories of column free interior space, corner windows, and a huge central rooflight opening, which doubles as a ring beam.

In 2006 the house won the Grand Designs Award for the Best New Build House of the Year and has recently been awarded the 2007 RIBA Manser Medal.

Link Via [World Architecture News ]