This Swiss delight was a collaboration between Dutch architects at SeARCH and Christian Muller Architects. Located in the village of Vals, and surrounded by other underground hobbit style homes, it would only take a quick blink to miss this buried treasure. The elliptical arch of the opening frames a stunning view of the mountains and surrounding valley, while it also allows enough natural light in to flood the interior rooms with warm sunshine. I would also guess that the energy used to heat this beauty would be substantially less than an above ground dwelling, with all that soil for insulation, so not only is this choice to go underground preserving the natural beauty of the valley by not adding another man made structure, it’s also reducing it’s other footprints. Big ups to their going under and to all stealth architecture!
via RADDblog
Are you sure about the footprint?
Producing concrete is awful for the footprint.
Yesterday here, (tagsurfing ‘architecture’), were many more pics with concrete in all of them. The good thing about this buildin is, that they have also used stone.
Instead of concrete, I prefer stone, lime and wood. Lime, (I’ve been told), needs only1/3 of the energy that concrete does. We are looking more into it in January when we get some hard facts about this.
As you probably guessed, we aim to build with stone, lime, clay and (thinning) wood. We also use secondhand glass and other recycled materials. It is cheap, if you do the work yourself, as it is very labour-intense. And it leaves a very small footprint.
Henry
Thanks for your comment Henry!
No, I am definitely not sure. But it seems to me that the long term energy savings of creating an underground space, even taking into consideration the high energy requirements of producing the concrete used, would be a win for the footprint. And definitely a win for the beauty of the landscape. Do you think this house could have been realistically built without concrete? I know very little about this style of architecture, but would love to learn more. If you have any recommendations of good info sources I would appreciate it!
Thanks & best,
paige
Hi again!
We try to manage to build a underground house that costs less than 10.000 € and have 70 sq.meters of warm space.
Why does it not cost more? That is because almost everything is DIY. Even the bandsaw-mill for the logs.
Two persons will manage to make this kind of building within 18 – 24 months.
In English:
http://provillage.wordpress.com/
One of the pics:
http://provillage.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/house-open-wall.png?w=378&h=260
Here is many more pics, and even if the text is in Finnish, all the links are to to sites that use English:
http://provillage.wordpress.com/
Any questions will be answered in English, so please ask whatever you like. Or any other person.
Lots of info, in English, about this all, can also be found at the end of the blog = three quite big pdf-files (some 130 pics, so be patient)
http://provillage.wordpress.com/about/
Please remember to send us questions. We love them, as we get a reason to write more about the whole building-process.
Henry
Hi again Henry!
I just found this link to a concrete recipe that has 50% less environmental impact than the standard mix. Thought you might be interested!
http://livebuilding.queensu.ca/green_features/concrete
Paige
Thank you for your tip! Much appreciated.
Henry
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