2017 Austin Modern Home Tour
It's time for the 9th annual Austin Modern Home tour. It happens next weekend and it's one of my favorites (second to the AIA Home tour) because it focuses solely on modern homes. This year Bercy Chen Studio has not one, but two homes on the tour, their Tetra house pictured above and the home located on San Juan dr. There are some other great houses on the tour as well that are definitely worth checking out, but I'm especially excited about the Tetra house. You can get a sneak peek of it below...
“Tetra House
The Tetra Fourth House is a 3000 square-foot single-family residence located in the lively neighborhood of South Austin.
The house is designed to be inward-looking, centered around a small, intimate courtyard containing a pool and a gravel garden with Japanese maple trees. Inspired by the constructivist paintings of El Lissitzky, the house is envisioned as a series of volumes and surfaces that are layered and intersecting, but never quite coinciding. This has the effect of both minimizing the presence of the house along the streetscape and creating a series of strategic vantage points within and around the house.
Central to the concept is a material play of concrete and wood. As such, the design consists of a ‘plinth’ of sorts of poured-in-place concrete walls arranged as axial datum lines to partition the site. The upper level, in turn, consists of floating wood boxes that in composition and texture play off the concrete walls below. Glazing functions to weave between the two material striations.”
