Camouflage: Hiding the House!

Home designers may focus on the setting for their designs but the ideal for ecologically sound development is simply minimizing or completely negating the impact of development. Making the house “disappear” by blending the development into the surrounding landscape is one design development finding a degree of credibility after a shaky start.

Painting existing development can be used to minimize the visual impact on the environment by using a color scheme which blends the dwelling into the environment. This has achieved mixed results as can be seen with the “pixilated camouflage” of this home in Ohio:

Perhaps someone still has an issue after an extended tour in Iraq, but the following home in Gulfport, Florida achieves a more appealing, aesthetic impact by using a jungle paint job, inspired by Vietnam or excessive viewing of Oliver Stone’s “Platoon”?

These two “camouflage” paint jobs may be amateurish in their effort to stamp individuality onto existing dwellings or a valid attempt at integrating the property with its surroundings, but serious designers and architects are exploring the possibilities too.

The “Camouflage House” by Johnsen Schmaling Architects, seeks to combine a low slung design with funky paintwork and natural materials to provide aesthetic appeal.

The funky paint work still intrudes upon the eye when close up to the dwelling, however this is countered by the dwelling nestling into a bluff on a lake side and takes advantage of a camouflage feature: the ability to blend in with surroundings at a distance but to be visible up close.

Japanese architect, Hiroshi Iguchi has taken the camouflage concept further in home design with his “Camouflage House 3″ and eschewed the use of paintwork completely. Here, a greenhouse design incorporates trees and plants as part of the design of the dwelling which further minimizes the impact on the landscape by using trees, commonly found in the area, as the basis for the living material of the design.

Camouflage is not simply the use of color or materials which mimic the immediate location but also uses the fact that our brains are keyed to recognize set shapes and associate them with certain objects. In military terms, the object of tying rag and netting to a helmet or weapon is to break up the outline and shape so they will not be recognized. Mobius Architects of Poland have used this camouflage concept in their Edge House development – the angles of the roof with inset skylight, with a steep shingled pitch are striking but mimic the quarry location while the outline of the dwelling is deliberately at odds with the viewers expected view of what a house should look like:

post by Dabney Properties, a Richmond corporate housing company.