Musubi Household / Craig Steely Architecture
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Textual content description offered by the architects. The Musubi Property is situated on 100 acres of grassland and Ohia forest alongside the northeast slope of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. This forged-in-location concrete household is absolutely off the grid—powered by photovoltaic panels and catching all domestic and landscape water from rainfall captured off the roof and saved in cisterns.
The web-site is made up of valleys with seasonal creeks and expansive fields of Wainaku grass. Panoramic views abound, but because of to their publicity to large winds and horizontal rain, the web page is complicated to build on. Its locale on the northeast side of the island is specifically in the route of the incoming western trade winds. Its elevation produces a climate dynamic that can swiftly switch from the excellent, cloudless blue sky without a trace of wind to enveloped with clouds to horizontal windblown rain in just minutes. The wind blows up by the prolonged valleys and fields generating the grass roll and swell like waves in the ocean.
The entrepreneurs arrived to us with a uncomplicated ask for: make a residence that embraces the mother nature of the windswept grasslands of the Hamakua coast. We responded with a dwelling that floats in this rolling sea of grass like a ship floats in the ocean. Like a ship’s prow, the sharpest end of this triangular house deflects the formidable wind.
The property gets its identify from its resemblance in approach to the Hawaiian model of the Japanese wrapped rice snack onigiri. On various occasions, when viewing the drawings, a carpenter would remark how considerably the plan seemed like a musubi… so the identify caught. The diagram of the residence is simple—an out of doors triangle within an indoor triangle supporting a diamond-formed roof. The indoor triangle is made up of three limited curving concrete partitions. These concrete curves designate the three zones of the residence: the bed room/bathing zone, the kitchen zone, and the get the job done/residing zone. The triangle-formed atrium in the center supplies an outdoor place concerning these zones with a ground of reduce Pahoehoe lava. Doorways on two sides of the atrium retract seamlessly into the walls. A landscape of Hapu’u ferns and Rhapis palms results in a layer of veiled privateness to the outside shower and bedrooms of the atrium. This guarded area is usable in windblown fog or dazzling sun—a genuine extension of the inside room devoid of a roof.
The clients’ willingness to prioritize permeability over privateness gave us the flexibility to build a strategy devoid of doors or really hard boundaries. Areas circulation from zone to zone although normally remaining in visual call with the rolling landscape. Grass flows suitable up to the edge of the floor-to-ceiling glass partitions. Looking out the home windows onto the rolling grass landscape is like watching waves on the open up sea.
