Endless Summer Beach House

Carpinteria

How can a site’s constraints and environmental threats create a unique architectural solution for coastal living?

LOCATION:
Carpinteria

STATUS:
On the Boards

TYPE:
Residential

SIZE:
4,900 SF

The Endless Summer Beach House is an oceanfront home in Southern California. The poured-in-place cast concrete structure provides the resiliency necessary to coexist within a dynamic coastal environment, where ocean-born storm surges, anticipated sea level rise, earthquakes, and inland flooding all affect this site. The home is designed to sit on concrete walls and piers that drill down for support in bedrock. This allows the home to “float” and bridge across the ever-changing shoreline. The home sits on a narrow lot, and the longitudinal section of the home provides light and space deep into the site.

The abstracted and romantic notion of Southern California surf culture is perhaps most embodied by the 1966 surf film “The Endless Summer.” It’s iconic screen-print movie poster captures a certain fluorescent quality to the light and air of Southern California. Likewise, the house is designed as a series of illustrated vignettes that borrow operative strategies from screen-printing in which individual architectural components are flattened into fields of color tone. During design, these conceptual drawings helped to explore the relationship of drawing to architecture and attempt to illustrate a contingent mythology for this place by the sea. This process of flattening forms and extrapolating visual layers generates artifacts that inform the language of the architecture, as do the forces of the site and the needs of the surfers who will one day occupy this home.