Situated along the Connecticut shoreline of Long Island Sound, the Spiral House seeks to engage, reflect, and enhance the surrounding coastal climate and its atmospherics of light, air, and water. Formally and spatially, the house is a direct, pragmatic response to the strict environmental and local zoning regulations imposed on the building and its site. Conceptually, the house is the resultant form of an interface and tension between two systems of geometry - one projective, the other radial. Through an overlapping construct of spatial progression, growth, and interference, the socio-spatial roles of publicity and privacy; interior and exterior; house and landscape, are intimately connected and entwined, yet also left open-ended and indeterminate, much like the water itself. It is an architecture that operates precisely and creatively within the found and prescribed social and environmental boundaries of the place to produce a dynamic, experience-oriented dwelling.
In all its details, Spiral House is a performance of formal and material operations that mirror and celebrate the dynamism of the sea and its perpetual, operatic transformations. We selected cedar wood siding (to respond and innovate upon the cedar wood shingle and clapboard houses in the surrounding neighborhood), large panel glass window and door systems to promote extraordinary views of the Long Island Sound, and concrete, for its durability and strength to resist the coastal New England storm surges over time. The contrast between the spiral wood structure and its vertical wood-fin skin against the concrete plinth and ramp, combined with the 11’ tall transparent/reflective glass curtain wall system—produces a complex range of shifting perceptual effects that echo and re-present the house within the context of the coastal atmosphere.
Photography ©Jeff Goldberg/Esto
Status: Built
Location: Greenwich, CT, US
