This award-winning glass and steel house emerges like a hovering sculptural form. It serves as the architect’s, Anthony Coscia, own home set in the artistic and eco-friendly community of Venice, California.
The house is a conceptual single plane transformed into a wave that wraps the upper levels. The feeling of continuity is inspired by the traditional calligraphy concept of Sumie – writing a word without taking your pen from the paper – everything seems to be flowing, uninterrupted.
Feeling much larger than it already is, the 2,250 sq. ft. space features a multi level, light filled open plan and an enclosed outdoor living room, combined with 12 foot high glass walls and full height sliding doors – all contributing to the indoor-outdoor living experience. The entire volume is amazingly spacious, open and airy.
Inside, the interior is a continuous open space, which provides uninterrupted views through the house to the landscape, where Cyprus trees, bamboo, tall green tree hedges and Japanese plums make an appearance.
Steel construction techniques, often reserved for commercial structures, were used to accomplish the floating form’s rolled floors and wall-less free plan. Two large pylons, which hold up the sectional object bedroom suite, also house the functions of heating and air conditioning ducts, on demand water heaters, electrical sub panels and the radiant floor control.
Green features include white standing seam panels on the roofs and upper wall areas for solar gain diffusion, motorized with wind and rain sensors west facing windows and scoop skylights that catch ocean breezes and a large pie shape east-facing skylight over the double height entry to vent rising hot air.
The ground floor and raised ground floor of the eating space are concrete floors with a hydronic radiant floor heating system, which is solar powered ready. The kitchen dining space cantilevers over a raised thermal base of concrete and earth, which cools the house in summer.
“While designing the fluid curves of the final form during design development, the local ocean waves were studied to see how they form and break onto Venice Beach. There is a surfing term ‘tube’ for a wave that is hollow where it is breaking. This allows the surfer to be inside the space of the wave, which is the ultimate surfing experience, one of being in air but enfolded by the water. Skywave House’s floating forms attempt to capture that feeling of being held in space but enveloped in movement somehow frozen in time. Living in such a space evokes both the calm of an embrace and the excitement of being in motion.”
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