Super T-House Designs

Super T-House Designs

Super T-House Designs

The envelope's vibrant rust-colored veneer has acquired a dark, almost black, patina, which seems to have adopted the bark of the trees that encircle it. Although never really visible from the road, T-House is now camouflaged by a decade of fast-growing flora: Brush, ferns, and lush native grasses have grown thickly around the base. Meanwhile, the house itself has made peace with nature. Well, eleven years later, Marcelle and his wife, Diane, who also maintain a residence in Manhattan, now comfortably settled into their suit of mail, have organized the book collection in steel shelves accessed by suspended catwalks, and transformed this peculiar object in the landscape into a home. The library's prominently lofty, hovering position was apparently chosen to symbolize the owner's literary aspirations.

The top bar - 44 feet long, 12 feet wide, and 16 feet tall - houses the library, cantilevered over the base bar, which contains the rest of the home. Although the structure was conventionally built, the building is clad in heavy steel with a nickel and chromium finish. The house is a simple two-bar parti in which the dual elements are stacked perpendicularly. Their collaboration resulted in a structure so alien to its context that one would assume it would never settle into its site or be at home in its surrounding environs.

In the early 1990s, Lawrence Marcelle, an aspiring writer, commissioned architects Simon Ungers and Tom Kinslow to build a retreat for him and his 10,000-book collection on a 40-acre wooded site a few miles from genteel Saratoga Springs and neighboring villages.