Pixel House / Anderman Architects
Pixel House / Anderman Architects
Text description provided by the architects. A while ago, in the year 2017, we promised new clients of ours that we know how to do a “gradient wall”. One that starts sealed but fades and disappears into nothing… into the air. In hindsight, we promised quite quickly, not knowing the adventure that promise will take us.
Why do you even need to fade a wall? We wanted to enhance privacy from the next-door neighbor, while still giving ample daylight to the basement floor. To achieve them both at once, a fading wall seems like the perfect solution.
In the months and years since we have sweated a lot over that promise. We sweated because it took hundreds of work hours to develop the fading system. We sweated because putting that fantasy into a budgetary constraint is nearly impossible. We sweated because we understood that although physics and photoshop both start with the letter P, that’s all the similarities they share.
But we sweated mostly because we were sometimes afraid. Afraid that we cannot rise to that challenge and that promise. That might be impossible. The first site model was unstable. The second wasn’t light. The third was off-budget. The fourth…. well… you get the picture. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t simple.
In august 2022 we were finally able to breathe and wipe away all the sweat and the towels. At the end of that summer the wall was standing, just as we envisioned it – slowly fading to the sky.
