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Of Possible

@of_possible

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Exteriors, interiors, and everything in between.
New York City, Boston, Udaipur, Earth for now

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In upstate New York, a retreat by Brooklyn-based studio @of_possible offers a restorative antidote to the site’s previous inhabitant, shaped by rocks, fieldstone and glacially deposited boulders that define the landscape.

Led by founder and architect Vincent Appel, the brief was to create a guesthouse that could be regenerative and healing. A walkthrough of the site revealed a historic stone wall, likely built by farmers in the late 18th century from rocky glacial soil, setting a direction grounded in what was already there.

In the spirit of that wall, the building is perched atop large Ice Age-era boulders, known as glacial erratics, forming the structure’s ‘legs’, each selected for the right stance and presence. The design is clarified through contrast, a small, efficient footprint of just under 1,000 sq ft, made from timber and rock rather than steel and glass, deferring to the site while sitting in dialogue with the existing house.

Inside, the retreat unfolds across a compact plan that includes two bedrooms, offering a quiet, considered space for rest and retreat. Unlike most houses, entry begins from beneath, scaling a discreet stainless steel staircase to the front door, shifting the experience from ground to dwelling.

See how this retreat reworks the relationship between architecture and landscape via the link in bio or at wallpaper.com.

📷: @arorygardiner
🖊: @anna_fixsen by @of_possible

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3 months ago

by @of_possible

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3 months ago

Echo Pond

Our model of Echo Pond by @of_possible and @nsbuilders features a removable roof, allowing for a detailed view of the home’s interior. Wood elements and UV printed textures highlight the material palette throughout the interior spaces, and the model sits on a CNC milled high-density foam base with hand-finished terrain details.

Overall dimensions: 46” x 40” x 17”
Scale: 1/4” = 1’-0”
Client: Of Possible

#architecture #architecturemodel #modelmaking #fabrication #archisource #archdaily #dezeen by @of_possible

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3 months ago

Echo Pond

This archive model showcases @of_possible and @nsbuilders’s Echo Pond residence, a Scandinavian-inspired home. The model was made using a 3D-printed base finished with maple veneer, which was stained black to reflect the pine tar finished plywood mega-shingles that define the home’s facade.

Overall dimensions: 46” x 40” x 17”
Scale: 1/4” = 1’-0”
Client: Of Possible

#architecture #architecturemodel #modelmaking #fabrication #archisource #archdaily #dezeen by @of_possible

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3 months ago

The Findling 1 Rendering @darcstudio_ 2-5 Photography @arorygardiner taken in Columbia County by @of_possible

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The Findling

Space conceived as an object versus space conceived as relationships captures the two traditions of space making / imagining in the West and the East. This is a generalization, but it is a useful point of departure for noticing assumptions about how space is imagined, planned, and experienced. Defamiliarizing our own relationship to imagining and perceiving space is among the most useful exercises for encountering architectural ideas.

One approach (approximately Western) is to imagine space as geometric, rational, bounded, perspectival, owned, and controllable. Another approach (approximately Eastern) is to imagine space as relational, infinite, unfolding through movement and time, without emptiness or fullness, inseparable from nature. This difference in imagining space can be understood as the void not as absence but instead as presence. Space can be monumentalized or it can be choreographed.

Arata Isozaki wrote about “Ma” as the concept of “in-betweenness”. This is a notion that there is a kind of natural space and time that exists in-between things. Instead of imagining space and time as discrete dimensions, it is possible to perceive space as both distance and duration.

Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky wrote about “negative space” as the subject-object positioning of figure-ground. This is a notion that is a nominalizing dialectic way of imagining and making space. The creation of negative space or figure and ground is relational in its own way as it is object-making subject-positioning.

The poet John Keates coined the idea of “negative capability” as being “…capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. What kind of space has negative capability? What kind of architecture has a stance but not necessarily a position?

¹⁻² Rendering @darcstudio_
³⁻⁵ Photography @arorygardiner
⁶ Rendering @darcstudio by @of_possible

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There is no way to know the potential or conceptual weight of a material by only drawing it. You have to carry it, stack it, carve it, and break it to know what it feels like and what it can do. Or, you have to go find someone like Tom and follow him around his quarry to learn what is possible.

This post is about Tom and his Vermont Verde Serpentine. Tom bought the old and storied quarry south of Barre, VT in 2006 after a lifetime in stone work across the United States. This is a quarry that was first opened in 1920 and is one of the few quarries on earth with high quality marble-like green serpentine. The geologic lens that forms the quarry is deep which makes it challenging to operate. It is also in Vermont and has limited weather dependent seasonal operation. This is a material that looks like marble but is nearly as hard as granite with low absorption and high flexural strength. Mies van der Rohe chose its French/Italian and Greek cousins, “Alpine Green and Ancient Green Marble” for the Barcelona Pavillion. Tom chose it as an iconic part of North America’s construction and architectural history. Since 2006 he has operated the VT Verde quarry for craft oriented production of unique architectural and sculptural projects. The Vermont quarry happens to have a high concentration of pyrite. Mystics are attracted to its protective, confidence inspiring, healing, and good fortune properties. Depending on the block, the pyrite looks like full golden chocolate chip chunks or dusted throughout the stone creates a bronze iridescent glow.

Thank you Tom. by @of_possible

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5 months ago

Let the drawings be drawings, renderings be renderings, models be models, photographs be photographs, buildings be buildings, and architects be architects.

Each element of the architectural process has its own lineage, discipline, and craft. These elements are architypes that are both inherited into the architectural process and manifest through it. Remaining in awe of the discrete knowledge within these disciplines is a precondition for the most successful collaborations and adventures into, across, and through synthesizing of their mediums.

A prior name of our studio was “Medium”. “Dia” had already been ingeniously claimed by Heiner Friedrich, Fariha Friedrich, and Helen Winkler Fosdick for their art foundation. “Dia” comes from the Greek word for “through” and precisely evoked the nature of their creative institution. Dia would be a great name for an architecture studio.

The word “idea” comes from the Greek word for “form” or “pattern” derivative of the verb “to see”. I do not know if it is uncanny alliteration or if the words are etymologically related, but in our imagination the words “idea” and “dia” sum up to mean “through form or patterns there is seeing” and through how we see, we create the world.

The various architypes of architectural representation are mediums through which we encounter ideas and learn how to see a project. Despite their sometimes mercurial realism (i.e. in the case of a photorealistic rendering), they remain like mercury to an alchemist — a first matter, a bridge between spirit and body, a way to move through states of being, and beyond a symbol of transformation a crucial ingredient in the creation of the alchemic philosopher’s stone.

The Greek messenger god was Hermes and his Roman name was Mercury. These gods were tricksters, travelers, and messengers. This is a useful mythology to keep in mind as we position ourselves relative to the creation of more recent god-like characters in our world — AI, the information it returns to our prompting, and in turn how we see the world into being.

¹Mercurial rendering by @DarcStudio_ by @of_possible

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10 months ago

Architecture is an assembly of many technologies. As the rate of innovation and sophistication of these increases, the probability of architecture collaging the production of other industries seams to increase.

The collage in architecture holds a special status as a design strategy. Entire design languages have emerged charismatically crafting aesthetics of collage. However, the aestheticizing of technological milieu can slip into an aimless commodification of architecture and distract from elemental innovation.

Technologies have an arc to the rate of their innovation (e.g. Moore’s Law). Sometimes as a technology approaches a late period in its life cycle the rate of innovation declines. Instead of revolutionary increments of improvement, smaller increments of refinement, and even regression set in (e.g. Law of Diminishing Returns, S-Curve, Feature Creep, Complexity-Fragility Trade-off). Eventually “improvements” risk complication and exposure to liabilities.

The Findling is elemental out of economic and philosophical necessity. Each building component is essential and reduced as far as possible. For example, all glass windows are simply glazed directly into wooded jambs. No glass is operable. This dramatically reduces cost and maximizes sight-lines. Egress and fresh air are provided by opening insulated and gasketed shutters that are simply part of the wall. These cost less to make and provide greater insulation and air sealing value per dollar compared to high performance windows. Another example is the roof which is simply bitumen sheets. Seams are reinforced by wrapping battens in bitumen over each seam location. This coincidently nods to a more technologically advanced metal standing seam roof.

The result is an architecture of the essential, elemental, reductive, intuitive, natural, and whole. Everythign is intrinsicly related to the whole and nothing can be removed as excessive.

¹ Model
²⁻³ Shutter details
⁴ Window detail
⁵⁻⁷ Window installation
⁸ Plan

#Architecture @Of_Possible⁠
#Construction @alulawoodworks
#Models @castillo.fab⁠
#Photographs @jakebalston
⁠#Images @DarcStudio_⁠
#Highperformancematerials @475.supply taken in Hudson Valley, NY by @of_possible

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Architecture is an alignment problem and the result is on a scale that can be described with limits at a minimum viable product on the one side and maximum viable product on the other. The design process aligns a constantly evolving set of variables that change from project to project and over time within any given project (i.e. budgets, material and labor availability, emotions, ideas, schedules, ambitions, etc.). The amount of energy invested in design establishes the degree to which “solving” this alignment problem can be optimized.

With limited energy the design process trends towards a linear approach to problem solving. As energy and resources increase, the design process can become more iterative, recursive, and able to test upper and lower limits of solutions. The Findling is an example of a maximum viable product.

In the spirit of differentiating the building as much as possible from its neighbor on the property, we attempted to make it entirely out of wood. An earlier design iteration was heavy timber structural framing with connections to the boulders inspired by Ethan Stebbins @stebbinsdesign. Even the hinges, door handles, sinks, nails, and every single component except for the glass and boulders was to be wood. We were more than a million dollars over budget. The project was redesigned with a more common light frame assembly.

Pushing the idea of the all-wood building so far and past the budget was not a waste during design. Ideas were encountered. Feasible all-wood details for sinks, windows, shutters, the rainscreen, roof, and other elements were discovered.

To create a project intentionally positioned between minimum and maximum viable product is only possible with a highly iterative and recursive design process that closely involves everyone including clients, builders, authorities, engineers, supply chains, manufacturers, etc. through design. A client request for a minimal or maximal viable project has equal potential provided you arrive there intentionally.

#Architecture @Of_Possible⁠
#Construction @alulawoodworks
#Models @castillo.fab⁠
#Photographs @jakebalston⁠
#Insulation @Rockwoolna⁠
#Highperformancematerials @475.supply taken in Columbia County by @of_possible

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The Findling

The architecture needed to be topologically distinct from the other house on the property. There is no front door. Instead of entering from the side of the building one enters directly into the middle of the plan from underneath. This fundamentally changes your relationship with entering. The home surrounds you upon entry with the hospitality of an embrace — the fundamental primitive gesture of a hug resting on the most basic approach to organizing stones on the land.

During an early site visit we noticed the topography at the edge of the woods sloped ten feet at a similar pitch to a comfortable stair. Atop this slope was an old stone wall. The idea of floating the building on glacial erratic boulders was inspired. The question of how to place a stair on this hillside and transition between the outer world and inner world was the next step.

The result is three primary building elements: the stones it rests on, a simple metal stair between grade and entry, and the almost entirely wooden home above. The stair is stainless steel to withstand the harsh environment. On the one hand it needed to be sturdy, safe, and comfortable. On the other hand, it needed to be something curious and unique. No detail could appear too familiar. There was an incredibly tight budget. An adventurous local metal fabricator was found. The stair was designed to be assembled from water jet cut steel sheets and simple bent parts. Each part was cut, labeled, and as much as possible prefabricated with the remaining parts bolted together on site. A custom perforated pattern was cut for drainage. Raised bars were added near the nose of each tread for traction. Simple metal helical pile footings support the stair. A sinuous railing without pickets was designed to invite a further departure from the familiar.

¹ Model
² Section
³ Detail
⁴ Axonometric
⁵ Structural analysis
⁶ 3D model
⁷⁻⁸ Framing
⁹⁻¹⁰ Stair installed

#Architecture @of_possible ⁠
#Construction @alulawoodworks
#Model @castillo.fab
#Photographs @jakebalston
⁠#Images @darcstudio_
#Highperformancematerials @475.supply @rockwoolna ⁠
#Masonry @cgstoneinc
#sitevisit @nsbuilders
#Helicalpiles @technometalpost taken in Hudson Valley, NY by @of_possible

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