Fantastic Compositions: Walls' Language

What’s the language of a wall? A wall can tell a story concerning the essence of the distance it confines. From the Japanese Tea House, the wall is additive: a layering of wood frames and sliding screens. From the ancient ruins of Mesa Verde, the cliff is carved into little dwellings as occupied earthen chambers. It is subtractive and residual. At a medieval castle, the wall was thick and battered: a stone fortress for security and permanence. From the backyard, a wall is a allĂ©e of trees or a trimmed hedgerow. The homes here speak a language of their own through the walls that bound them.

SB Architects

At a speech of thinness, modulation, and exact structure, wood is utilized here in order to delineate the wall for a screening device. By varying the period of spacing members, solidity transforms into layered openness like a large, fixed Venetian blind.

Architects Magnus

Thick concrete walls anchor and ground that this home into the website, while an extremely narrow wood display lightens the mass of extends and garage like a sock beyond the facade to become a balustrade for your second-floor balcony. This is a language of layered translucency.

Urban Earth Design

An inset glass box can be used here in order to catch the reflected light of an outside Zen garden and to bring it inside along the floor. The wall becomes a luminous prism of light during the daytime, and a luminous alcove as observed from the outside at night. Just amazing.

Coates Design Architects Seattle

Walls can on occasion become bubbles in the borders of rooms. The roof seems to float over a projected metal-clad wall from an otherwise glassy pavilion. In the same way, a masonry wall extends and thickens to allow an inset wood seat marking the entrance.

Dick Clark + Associates

Here is a language of solidity and permanence, spoken in stone puncuated by glass and dark wood unturned to blend with the landscape and plant. Stone is used to mark the domain of 3 constructions, while glass wood is used as a hyphenating connector between them.

Much like an ancient ruin, this bed-chamber alcove looks carved from a solid earthen mass. The wall is rendered narratively, as a subtractive component until there is nothing more to remove.

Studio William Hefner

Similarly, this stair and seating alcove appears as a subtractive fragment of a much thicker material. This is a language of carving, molding, and sculpting and reminds me of the quiet privacy of Mesa Verde and Santorini.

Yaniv Schwartz – Photographer

A solid, thick, thick white stucco wall is obviously quiet and calm and functions as supporting background for a projected glass window climbing. The wall has openings where needed for the inside to extend outside towards that wonderful garden room.

Sometimes a wall is a window with a perspective from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. The fluctuations of character itself become the end.

Webber + Studio, Architects

And occasionally a wall becomes a roofing.

Jensen Architects

The language of planes, lines, and openings produces a trellis-like ceiling for an outside walkway. The lines signal motion to a distant point in space.

Make Architecture

A wall can also become a portal site framing a distinctive area or the landscape. This spacious wood”point” contrasts between solid stucco planes and can be closed with clear glass. Is it a wall, or is it a window — or door?

Modern house architects

So what is the language of your wall? Is it open or closed, thick or thin, added to or subtracted from, layered or looking as carved from a block of clay? A wall will more than simply sew space. It can become an extension of the space and serve the language of architecture.

More:
Excellent Compositions: Heavy and Light
Great Compositions: The Dogtrot House
Great Compositions: The L-Shaped House
Wood Slats in Design: Repetition, Scale and Light

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