Design Awards

Natural Connection

Over two decades, Arthur Andersson, AIA, and Chris Wise, AIA, of Andersson-Wise Architects, have developed a strategy for designing projects by drawing inspiration from the cultural and physical imagery of their context. Through client and design team collaboration, the firm's work seeks to uncover and understand the complexities of each site. The investigation inevitably reinforces both the physical and emotional connections already established in a locale, and ultimately yields a new destination of symbolic importance to this intersection of client and context. The Martin Boathouse and Bridge project embodies the success of the firm's strategic approach to design solutions.

As the family's new residence was under construction in the hills of West Austin, the Martins asked Andersson-Wise to design a half-mile pathway from the site of their house across a deep ravine to an opposing ridge and eventually leading down to a boathouse sited on Lake Austin below. The client's program required convenient means of access to the lake with minimal intervention on the surrounding landscape. These criteria, coupled with the existing texture and terrain, compelled the architects to consider a pedestrian link rather than a mechanical connection. This sensitive orientation towards the immediate context allowed the architects to create a series of subtle, mediated responses that are at once delicate yet dramatic and experientially rich.

A 200-foot-long wood-and-steel cable-stayed suspension bridge was designed to span the ravine and thus afford an easy path to the opposite ridge. At this point, the ridge drops 100 feet and is negotiated via a stone staircase to the shores of Lake Austin and the boathouse below.

The boathouse is a two-story prefabricated steel grid infilled with ipe wood window frames, floors, walls, and ceiling. The barge-delivered steel structure is welded onto pylon supports which rest atop submerged rocks. The steel is painted with a protective zinc coating in a sympathetic hue that allows for a gentle visual transition between lake and sky. The 800-square-foot structure's first level provides covered space for two slips (for a boat and a personal watercraft) and a minimal amount of dry storage under the stairway, as well as an uncovered sculling dock. The second level is divided between an exterior shower and a freestanding screened porch that serves as an elevated outdoor room. The outdoor room converts to a screen-awning-clad space that opens to the three sides directly exposed to views of the water, a configuration that allows convection currents and breezes off the lake. The room is equipped with a small storage and appliance cabinet on the south wall. A wooden trellis, which serves as an armature for growing vines, protects the west side from direct sunlight.

It has been said that the most successful projects are the ones which, once built, seem inevitable, as if they grew sympathetically from the contextual conditions of site and client. This may or may not be so, depending on the skills and sensitivities of those involved. It is, however, especially true in this instance: The architects embraced a very dramatic and complex set of intersecting landscape conditions in a manner which has yielded both a wonderfully simple, poetic, and formally elegant boathouse and accompanying bridge while also offering a durable and delight-filled place of human experience.

--A senior lecturer in UT Austin's School of Architecture, Stephen Ross also works with Black and Vernooy Architects and Urban Design

RESOURCES
lueders limestone: Mezger Enterprises