If just the thought of looking down at the ground dozens of stories below through the glass box at the Willis Tower’s Skydeck makes your head spin, you probably won’t want to be first in line to live at Casa Brutale. This cliff dwelling is a conceptual design from Open Platform for Architecture, and it looks equal parts amazing and dizzying.
Architects Laertis-Antonios Ando Vassiliou and Pantelis Kambouropoulos want to design an “inverted reference” to Casa Malaparte. That cliff house, built in 1942, reaches skyward with its upended-pyramid stairs. Casa Brutale, on the other hand, would dive down into the cliff itself and be mostly underground. “The optical impact of the building on the landscape is minimal, with only one façade on the cliff side and no volume extruding from the ground level,” according to the architects’ website.
The design was also inspired by traditional Greek vernacular architecture that is “wisely integrated in the landscape, more sustainable and ecological than most contemporary architectural solutions” Vassiliou told Slate. Made of glass, wood, and concrete (even the bed is made of concrete, though presumably you’d still get a mattress), the 1,938-square-foot home would be accessible by a staircase or elevator. The roof would actually be the bottom of a swimming pool and “a continuation of the poetic Aegean Sea and in perfect communication with the vast blue of the Greek sky,” the architects write.
Last year, Australian architecture firm Modscape debuted its own conceptual design for a cliff house, though that one was literally hanging off the cliff. The Casa Brutale would look slightly less dramatic from the water and would probably be slightly less vertigo-inducing. Still, the architects are still looking for someone with the gall and gold to build the house.
Update 3/18/2016: Designboom reports OPA (Open Platform for Architecture) will actually build Casa Brutale in Beirut, Lebanon.
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