Make The Building Float
Castle High is a client-led self-build in a remote part of Pembrokeshire, west Wales. It began with a simple ambition and a difficult one: to make a heavy material feel light. To make a home float over a sensitive Coastal National Park.
At this scale, architecture lives or dies within its tectonics and careful detailing. Not the concept alone, and not the image, but the way structure becomes the manifestation of the idea. The test is to make the lightness in ground contact effortless and almost inevitable.
These photographic studies show how careful detailing helped create a feeling of the impossible.
The deep shadow beneath the building reinforces the invisible tension between ground and architecture. Leaves pass through this shadow joint, allowing nature to draw attention to the absent connection with the ground.
Below is our 1:5 construction detail. It shows how the functional and pragmatic drawn intent becomes a built expression of the relationship between object and earth.
—