Softie
OPA
Why can’t architecture be more like nature—changeable, varied, and uninhibited? Our client wanted to return home and feel a sense of private freedom, a release from the conformity of the world outside. In this project, we softened her existing Modernist house by infusing it with an atmosphere of clouds. The clouds scatter freely throughout the house, and dissolve and soften it
in different ways. The clouds erode and blur the order of the rational modernist grid, creating a sense of space that floats and drifts. Moments of softness are encountered unexpectedly—the interventions are like a mist that has settled unevenly. The softness dissolves the entry, melts the stairs, wafts through the house on all three floors, and a lonely cloud is trapped above a sheltered terrace.
Key Team Members
About the organization
At OPA, we believe in progressive built work, driven by ideas. We believe that architecture influences how we see the world and live in it. That architecture impacts our perceptions and emotions, and acts as a physical framework for thought. By organizing our bodies and experiences in space, architecture can transform us. Our strength at OPA is identifying and crafting spatial experiences to make that possible. For us, every project is personal, whether private or public. Fundamental to our work is our close relationship to our clients and communities, whose use of our spaces give life to the architecture. We see the design process as a joint exploration of expanding and choreographing what’s possible. Together, we uncover what a project really wants to be and make that desire a physical reality.