The house-house type of house, the one indispensably topped by a pitched roof, has been reintroduced to a massive extent in recent years. It is found in the compositional codes of modern architecture. The occurrence can be traced in a number of projects designed by LowDO, too. After meeting at Harvard Graduate School of Design, its two founders – DK Osseo-Asare (State College, Pennsylvania, 1980) and Ryan Bollom (Spring, Texas, 1979) – set up their integrated design practice in Austin, Texas in 2011.

In projects on Texan territory, such as the Guadalupe River House in New Braunfels (2017) and the Dakota Mountain Residence in Dripping Springs (2019), the archetypical pitched building was stripped of all primordial tectonic roots and deconstructed, cut and recomposed. At the Guadalupe River House, this leads to a sculptural mass; at the Dakota Mountain Residence, it is reworked in terms of point, line and surface. In both cases, the morphological choices reflect LowDO’s bent for working on the construction content and technology of buildings by interweaving into the warp and weft complex materials and systems with systemic and sustainable worth.

Just as sustainable is the attention given to the social aspects and use of the residential spaces; they are condensed in these two buildings. They represent a broader propensity to consider architecture as part of a dynamic and heterogeneous ecosystem. At the Guadalupe River House, the repartitioning of the pitched volumes is used to optimise ventilation and shading, which improves at once the liveability of the rooms inside and the energy performance. By interpreting the climate, the Dakota Mountain Residence redefines the format of the Texas homestead, giving shape to a previously unseen type of familial co-dwelling for intermittent use in terms of spaces and functions: two families and two living quarters are protected by a single welcoming roof.