The Stone: A Weird House That’s Little More than an Elevated Block of Soil
Charged with creating something at the intersection of art and architecture, entrants in the “Art and Architecture” design competition created paintings, panels and sculptures, but one individual thought even further beyond the canvass box and concrete forms. His concept is one seriously weird house – essentially a block of soil embedded with living quarters, cut from the earth and elevated into the sky with cranes.
Designer Marcelo Ertorteguy submitted a piece that is at once far-fetched and down-to-earth. It is a kind of conceptual proposition – a hovering home at the intersection of nature and technology, composed of supporting cranes on either side and a carved block of soil suspended between them.
There is far more fantasy than reality to this design – it is not meant to work in the physical world on any particular level, and could not be constructed as such. The ‘house’ portion exists in limbo between the various elements, and shifts from one drawing or rendering to the next.
Despite having such fictional roots, it is hard not to wonder what it would be like to live in such a place – amorphous, mobile and changeable like a Salvador Dali painting.
More from the designer
“The Stone is a House, a petrified piece of soil cut and lifted from the ground, intervened by the machine. The House is the act itself of its own construction. It is dwelt through its transformation, starts flush with the ground working as a bunker; it unfolds as it rises revealing its expanded interior and when it reaches its maximum height acts as an inhabitable cloud.”
About Marcelo Ertorteguy
Marcelo Ertorteguy is now one-half of design duo Stereotank. “Stereotank is a design studio founded by Marcelo Ertorteguy and Sara Valente, dedicated to the research and exploration of the common grounds between architecture, art and sound. The studio works as a laboratory for design and creation of architectural artifacts, immersive installations, hybrid objects and instruments often using repurposed materials and pre-fab systems. Stereotank focus is to re-invent program with existing resources, with the aim of looking at old things with a fresh eye, relying on simplicity and intuition. Understanding urban scape as the medium, one of the main interests at this scale is the activation of public space through the insertion of participatory projects that engage, entertain and educate the users.”
