Vortex House

Malibu, California
Completed 2012

Architect: Heather Roberge, Murmur
Structural Engineer: William Koh & Associates

The project’s ambition lies in its dramatic spatial modulation and the saturation of its interior with the visual and geometric material of the surrounding site. Rather than understanding the views as a way to release the interior to the exterior, the surrounding geometric and topographic features are drawn into the interior to condition its atmosphere. Artificial and natural geometries are characterized as of the same fluid medium, and the house is a vortex into which this material is drawn. This ambition shapes each part of the house’s organization: a five-sided sculpted massing, folded roof and ceiling planes, raked window apertures and an involuted patio.