Upstate House – Christian Wassmann
Wassmann’s cosmic sense of place is confirmed during a visit to his airy, light and book-filled ninth-floor studio in Manhattan’s West Village. Sketches and studies relating to his current and past projects abound, some as arcane looking as those of an ancient master of the natural sciences. In the course of taking a visitor through an exquisite scale-model of the house he was building at the time for his family, on a hill near Woodstock, New York, Wassmann explains that the structure was designed with the course of the sun in mind and built to semi-enclose a massive bluestone boulder that has sat in place, there on top of the hill, Wassmann supposes, since the end of the last Ice Age.
A desire to live with nature is one of Wassmann’s driving forces. His house is structured of prefabricated timber elements, built on a 50’ x 50’ concrete platform made out of bluestone gravel sourced from the site, and topped with a dramatic, almost exultant-looking cone-shaped roof surfaced with photovoltaic shingles. The roof’s main beams radiate toward a curved beam surrounding the rock, as panels of curved glass frame the boulder, defining a courtyard blessed with picturesque views of the Hudson Valley and the Berkshires. The house, explains Wassmann, is designed “to collect energy from the rays of the sun, water for a swimming pond from the rain, and geothermal heat, from the earth below. Our goal is that the building generates more energy than it uses.”
