A retired Army captain asked us to design an urban loft on a steep, wooded, rocky site overlooking the Delaware River in rural Pennsylvania.  The house was to serve as an escape from NYC and a laboratory for ideas - a place to read and work, pace and think.  The basic design is composed of two intersecting volumes. The large volume is a multi-level loft space - long, narrow, high - oriented parallel to the river below. Intersecting this is a smaller, three-story volume, capturing the main entry and housing all "wet" functions - bathrooms, hydronic heating system, etc.  The sleeping mezzanine cantilevers into the main space and provides access to a planted (green) roof covering the entire large volume.  The interior is
finished almost exclusively in maple plywood, punctuated with openings that frame the surrounding forest, rock outcroppings and river.  The exterior is a combination of wood and corrugated metal, playing off the utilitarian materials used on many nearby agrarian structures.