Hsu House

Ithaca, NY, United States

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Hsu House

Ithaca, NY, United States

Firm

EPIPHYTE Lab

Type

Residential › Private House

YEAR

2010

The Hsu House is a small 2200 sq.ft. house
designed by EPIPHYTE Lab using passive solar principles to create an inexpensive, energy
efficient dwelling for a young family. Rising out of a hillside south of
Ithaca in upstate New York, the bifurcating monopitch roof covers a house
organized around a three story main living space, which functions as both
spatial nexus and a trombe wall assisted ventilation stack. The space is bifurcated
by an interior south facing cast-in-place concrete heat sink mass wall, which
stores sensible heat and animates light, creating an all season solarium that,
in the summer, opens and unfolds into the natural landscape. The exterior cement-board
siding surface of the house was dynamically modeled to produce a gradient
pattern responding to cardinal solar orientation and to animate facade color to
dissolve the mass of the house in surrounding landscape.
The concrete mass wall was
considered necessary to damp diurnal energy fluxes and store absorbed solar
radiation. It was designed with three primary criteria in mind. First, wall
surface area was maximized to increase the rate of thermal transfer between the
sun, the wall, and the interior environment. Second, the shape was parameterized
to allow light from the solarium to pass through the structure, allowing
illumination of the north side of the first floor of the house. Third, the mass
wall was designed as the sculptural focus of the house, defining the entryway,
the kitchen, the solarium, and the edge of the triple height main living space.
The large number of parametric iterations was tested also in relation to the
fabrication process. The primary concern was maintaining a level of porosity
that would create a sense of lightness, allowing for views through the wall and
to counteract the tendency of the concrete to read as a massive and unwelcome
subdividing element in what is, after all, a fairly compact and spatially
diverse living space. The Hsu House holds Silver LEED certification.