Butterfly House | LiD Architecture

An autonomous intervention was made into an existing farmyard creating a large dramatic space in which the daily social life of the household is centred, allowing the smaller scale of the existing cottage to accommodate the more private ancillary spaces. This memorable room is intended to connect the existing cottage and family to both the surrounding rural community and landscape. In the tradition of the rural “open house” this room is of a size and flexibility to accommodate the frequent gathering of friends and relatives. Rather than engaging with the vernacular language of the existing farm typologies, both the form and materiality of the butterfly house evolved from relationships to the surrounding landscape. The volume and geometry of the extension were generated out of a shift in scale from the intimacy of the existing cottage to the scale, vision-lines, and modulation of light from the surrounding landscape. The “ceiling topography” created by the butterfly roof form also provides subtle definition to various sub-spaces within the larger volume of the extension. The materiality of the timber-framed structure utilises colour, rhythm, texture and the play of light and shadow to find connections to the surrounding rural context. The tones of the vertical fibre-cement panels relate to changing colours of the surrounding trees, hedgerows, fields, mountains, sky etc. through the full spectrum of daily and seasonal cycles. The cover strips for this cladding system are emphasized to pick up the vertical rhythms of surrounding trees, detailed to act as a growing structure for climbing vegetation, and articulated to allow light and shadow to give the façade a depth and layering in dialogue with the changing conditions. The resulting perception of the structure fluctuates between robust autonomous form and de-solidified patterns of light, colour, depth and rhythm which merge the butterfly house into the changing and ephemeral conditions of the surrounding landscape.