The timber cottage from Grand Design Sweden
In the lush archipelago south of Stockholm architect Xiao He and her husband Mats have built a vacation home with the help of SketchUp.
Grand Designs - The timber cottage from TV
In a forest glade, at the foot of 25-meter-high birch trees, there is a small wooden house and a guest house, lifted from the ground on concrete plinths.
The houses have references to the post-war Case Study Houses with its horizontal lines, old Norse feeling with the timber frame and a touch of Chinese temples. The unbroken continuous glulam beams are connecting the main house with the guest house. The houses are built like stacked jackstraws where each glulam beam has been given the exact dimension required to carry its load.
Xiao He runs the architectural firm Studio He and her main focus is to design private homes. In the start of each project, she finds the primary aspects that are unique to the specific project. It can be big or small; a view, a material, a window placement.
I always begin by hand with pen and paper… Is that a generational thing?
She says with a laugh and continues. But for me, there is no faster way to get ideas out of my head.
Once there is a direction and a shape, Xiao transitions in Sketchup. She feels that it has the perfect combination of 3d-modeling speed and visualization accuracy.
I love that it's sketchy, that the views don't feel too realistic, because it gives both me and the client a sense of being in the middle of the design process.
She continues to describe that it is easy to evaluate dimensions and materials without losing momentum. Xiao often starts with a simple volume model where blocks, that represent different parts of a house, are moved around.
Sandbox allows her to realize advanced and accurate 3d terrain directly from elevation curves that can be found on digital areal maps.
My favorite plugin is the Sandbox tool. If you work with close-to-nature projects, the terrain and environment are important for the placement and layout of the house.
Moving on from the sketch phase, Xiao switches to a CAD program, to produce all the necessary drawings for the project. The rigidness and depth in CAD are great for millimeter precision but it also locks the creative process.
If I want a different angel or try a new idea, I go back to Sketchup, I never sketch in CAD.
She describes the environment in Sketchup as direct and non-hierarchical, in that you can jump in and out of the program without the software being a hindrance to your design skills.
If SketchUp didn't exist, I would go back to analogue modeling.
Even though she uses Sketchup in the early stages of her projects, the final renderings are made from the same 3d-model.
The design process is not linear. Even if you start with the large outlines of the project and work your way to the center, even the smallest of detail can change the structure of the house and set the tone for the final look and feel.
