This project was a schematic proposal presented to potential clients who had recently retired, and intended to build a house on property 10 miles east of the town of Phillips, in north-central Wisconsin. The clients were a highly active couple who wanted their residence to flexibly accommodate a wide array of domestic and recreational activities, and also to provide the ability to accommodate their children and grandchildren who would frequently convene here for holiday reunions and visits during hunting and fishing season. The proposed design therefore sought to provide a flexible infrastructure that would allow the couple to spontaneously redefine the spatial and programmatic character of their house, and to place this within an unobtrusive structure that offered minimal visual disruption to the site as well as maximum insulation and tornado resistance.

The house was sited at the western end of a long finger-shaped clearing extending inward from the rural county road that marks the eastern boundary of the 110-acre wooded property. The northern edge of this clearing coincides with a low bank of land that falls away to the forested ravine of the Elk River.

A pair of American bald eagles had built their nest in a tall pine tree at the northern edge of this clearing, and this nest suggested the particular location of the house along the tree line of the clearing’s northern slope. The majority of the residential program was distributed within a low concrete base backed into this slope, with only a small superstructure comprised of a bird-watching platform and sheltered hot tub enclosure projecting above.

The residential program below was distributed along an uninterrupted program wall that separated the public living area from a narrow service zone. A continuous platform adjacent to this service wall provided an open “stage” upon which the occupants’ daily activities could be freely played out. Motorized rolling frames that spanned the transverse direction of this open living platform could be repositioned anywhere along its length. By adjusting the location of these rolling frames along the program wall, private program-specific “rooms” could be established as needed. Integral cabinets containing queen-size Murphy beds allowed up to three of these rolling rooms to serve as guest bedrooms.