The Radiant Hydronic House is based on feeding back various building systems into one another in order to produce emergent effects, both quantitative and qualitative. The house is structured by a set of flexible bands which take on various gradients of behavior—structural, mechanical, circulatory—depending on various local requirements, but also based on the behavior of adjacent bands.
While each building system performs, it does so only in relation, and in a state of biological epistasis (i.e. no one system is optimized but all systems are optimized in relation). This spine contains a reversible hydronic AC system which, in winter, transports liquids from solar pools down to a radiant slab inside the house. On summer evenings, this system also transports cool westerly winds down into a subfloor plenum to chill the thermal mass of the house for the following day.
The project is an interface connecting multiple disciplines; it is not just a design object but possibly a trace of a new way of practicing architecture which capitalized on performance not in a technical, but in an atmospheric way.
Client: Museum of Modern Art, SF
Type: House Prototype for GLAMOUR
