CAMPout / Faulkner Architects

A San Francisco family asked us to help them expand an existing property near Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The site sits on a north-facing slope and looks down to the Martis Valley and up to Lookout Mountain through a natural screen of 100-year-old Jeffrey pine trees. In our world today, much of the built work is driven by visual appearance. Symbolic forms and arbitrary material deployment remind us of our history. Usually, these collages of comfort for the eye ignore their contexts that should affect the work in a tangible way. Wooden, furniture-like houses built in an ever-expanding migration to the wild lands that are at risk of fire appear to thumb their noses at the danger and the sun and the wind.