A team from PennDesign’s Department of Architecture had the winning entry in Arch Out Loud’s recent design competition for a residence to sit beneath the famed Hollywood sign. Selected from among 500 entries, The Ambivalent House was designed by Jason Payne (Lecturer in Architecture, PennDesign, and Associate Professor, UCLA), Joey Giampietro (MArch‘16), Ryosuke Imaeda (MArch‘16), and Lecturer Michael Zimmerman (MArch‘15).
“Like the Chemosphere before it, this house pushes hard on the envelope of experimental residential design,” explain the designers in their proposal. “A spheroid floating low to the ground on a single column, the form is the anexact offspring of more geometrically perfect round houses already achieved.”
The competition asked participants to design a “house of the future” which demonstrates the use of innovative technology, integrative environmental strategies, and capitalizes on the iconic prominence of its site. The competition was organized as a design charrette generating ideas for the site’s future construction and inspiration for the future of residential design.
The Ambivalent House is noteworthy for an outer body that rotates very slowly around a dense, fixed core, and the majority of the external building skin is clad in photovoltaic film.
The competition’s jury included Thom Mayne, Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Practice in Architecture at PennDesign; David Basulto; Founder and Editor in Chief, Archdaily; and Tom Kundig, Principal, Olson Kundig Architects.
Expand Image
