I’ve been looking into methods of excavating stone for a new project, and it turns out that the world of rock excavation is much more interesting than I realized.

If you’re looking for crushed stone, a rock drill and some dynamite is all you need, but to get large usable slabs of stone requires a bit more finesse.  Cararra marble used to be quarried by drilling a series of holes on the edge of a cliff, inserting wooden ‘wedges’ and then soaking these with water – the expansion would cause the stone to crack along the line of holes and the resulting ‘bench’ was then moved to another facility to be cut to the proper sizes.

Modern methods are much cooler, and use two basic tools; gallery saws and wire saws.  A gallery saw is basically a 12-foot long chain saw for cutting stone.  They move along tracks and can cut either vertically or horizontally.  Wire saws are basically big motors attached to a huge rubber band studded with diamond discs.  The rubber band gets wrapped around the piece of rock you want to cut, then the wire saw pulls it tight and starts rotating it.  The diamond discs slowly slice the stone in half, like a cheese wire.

This video shows one of those chain saws in action.

Here’s a horizontal cut

This shows the wire saw – isn’t the space created after removing the slabs amazing?

And here’s what happens after the cutting’s finished…

Construction has begun on the Red Bluff Residence.  Well, not exactly construction; before we can begin building the house we must remove the abandoned oil pipeline that runs through the middle of the site.  Over the past two days, construction crews have been mobilizing for this potentially toxic task, and today they’ve managed to pull the pipe out of the ground!

Workers in HAZMAT suits seal a portion of the pipeline

Soil samples being collected to for contamination testing.

Pipeline being moved for cutting into segments

Worker preparing to cut a section off the pipe for disposal.

Hopefully the contamination tests will come back negative…

Here’s an interesting first pass at a detail.

This is showing the condition on Red Bluff where the green roof detaches from the adjacent grade, and there’s a lot going on here.  We’re incorporating a drainage trench around the perimeter of the green roof which allows us to irrigate at the top of the slope and catch runoff at the bottom.  This allows us to both recirculate irrigation greywater and to collect any rainwater that falls on the roof and migrates down the slope.  There’s also a challenging transition from cantilevered steel structure to joists bearing on a structural retaining wall which requries both a transition between structural systems and a consistent retaining surface for the adjacent grade.  We’ll see what the engineers have to say…

As we mentioned in the previous post, Red Bluff borrows from the oldest housing typology in the Western Hemisphere, the Pit House.  One of Red Bluff’s most dramatic architectural moves involves a 7 foot deep excavation which nestles the residence notably in the landscape, making it a modern version of this timeless dwelling.  Like the Pit House, Red Bluff will benefit from using the earth’s mass to maintain thermal comfort throughout the year.  The following sections illustrate the similarities between the Pit House and Red Bluff as they sit in the ground.

Pit House Section

Red Bluff Section

While the essence of Red Bluff is conversant with the Pit House, the process of refining the roof form has largely been influenced by a craft as time honored as this primitive dwelling; the art of origami.  One of the foremost authorities on the practice and theory of origami is American Physicist, Dr.Robert J. Lang.  According to him, “there’s a very simple problem that origami solves: whenever you have a big flat shape that has to get small.”  From the early design sketches, you can see Red Bluff’s roof form develop from an elongated, flat, rectangular shape into a couple of triangles that fold up from the landscape with grounded edges which act as the “creases”.

Refined Roof Angles

With this subtle folding of the landscape, an idea that combines origami with earth work, the possibility of a roof garden is born.  The following renderings show how the roof garden might look with various native flowers diagrammed by season.

Red Bluff is an active project located in Austin, Texas near Town Lake.  The following post serves to highlight key moments throughout the design process of  this 1400 square foot residence.  Listed below are the initial design charrettes for Red Bluff which illustrate three very distinct conceptual approaches with various iterations therein:

1.  A compound scheme with a marked axis

2.  A hacienda/Roman villa iconographic scheme

3.  Architecture as land art/earth work

The charrette that was ultimately chosen for further development is the third.   As seen in the work of conceptual German artist, Wolfgang Laib,  Red Bluff  similarly touches on architecture as site specific installation art, but it mostly deals with architecture as an extension of the landscape.  As with many of our designs, influence is often drawn from vernacular precedents of various cultures.  Red Bluff’s relationship to the landscape, both in terms of approach as well as building performance, references the oldest housing typology in North America; the Pit House.

Examples of the Pit House