Interesting Concepts From Danish Architect Soren Korsgaard

10 Jul '07 from JohnCommoner

Everyone, everywhere, is working on prefab. New ideas are popping up like dandelions on the first pretty spring day. I was just browsing YouTube and hit on this interesting video. It's from Danish architect Soren Korsgaard. I checked his website, and the house is actually a vacation cabin. It has an interesting sliding doors strategy that allows the occupants to reconfigure the house for different views, privacy, shelter from changing winds, etc. Kinda neat.

It's been pointed out to me that this house looks just like Peter Blake's classic "Pinwheel House." It really does. I think it's great to see the best ideas of the past being revisited in today's context.

I also saw this other cool house concept on Korsgaard's site, the "Standard House." It's anything but, though it would be great if it were, and everyone really lived in something like it. Check it out:

The house is designed to be built fast, to take advantage of passive heating and cooling principles, and will incorporate "root zone water purification." It's decidedly modern, and I like the simple solar shell concept. It actually reminds me very much of a solar house some family friends lived in back in the 1980's when I was growing up. The design was very similar to this. On a cold but sunny winter day they'd have to open the windows to let out extra heat, yet in the summer all the thermal mass kept the house nice and cool.

Korsgaard's other works are interesting as well. I like this industrial-inspired multifamily concept, curiously called "commune housing" (made me think communist bloc, not communal living).