2011 RIBA Award winners announced

Balancing Barn

Category: East
Architect: MVRDV with Mole Architects
Client: Living Architecture
Contractor: O'Seaman and Sons
Contract Value: confidential
Date of completion: Oct 2010
Gross internal area: 210 sq m

The house was designed as one of Alain de Botton's Living Architecture projects as a holiday home for people who come to have a dialogue with landscape. The building has a voyeuristic character whereby visitors gaze out on, their surroundings. The consistent use of ash over walls, floors and ceilings gives a carved quality to the interior that is cleverly at odds with the slight defections that remind visitors that they are suspended in mid-air. Creating buildings that can evoke such powerful feelings of obscure but pleasurable unease is very rare and the balancing barn hits the mark in a very unusual way

Photograph courtesy: Living Architecture