Ice Cave: The Timberline Lodge's New Entryway
Arcade (Seattle, WA), Oct 01, 2007 - by Brennan Conaway
The Timberline Lodge is getting a new entryway to protect visitors from the heavy weather atop Mount Hood, and if Peter Nylen and Ean Eldred could build it any way they wanted, they'd sculpt it from ice during the winter's first snow and watch it melt away the following spring.
"I’ve always thought that in many ways, the pinnacle of architecture is the igloo," says Eldred."As far as a structure's relationship to its landscape, culture, and resources, the igloo is the definition of elegance."Oregon building codes don 't recognize frozen water as a structural element, of course, so Nylen and Eldred turned to more permanent materials for their seasonal structure, which needs to withstand snow-and wind -loads during the winter but also be easily disassembled and stored away for the summer.
The front entrance to the Timberline Ledge is on the inside corner of the building's two wings. In winter, it acts as a giant scoop, collecting snowdrifts 10 feet high or more. To shelter people as they ascend the stairs to the lodge. Nylen and Eldred designed a series of modular parabolic arches cut from aluminum plate and skinned with polycarbonate panels.
The sections are 20 feet across, 20 feet tall and when all 11 are bolted together they'll create an entryway that tunnels out almost 40 feet from the lodge's front door. With its pale palette of white panels and aluminum, the entry feels like the interior of a snow cave or the cathedral-like space within a glacier crevasse.
"We conceived of the new entry as a temporary snowdrift, piled against the massive masonry facade of the Lodge," say the designers, who are collectively known as NE Works. "The entry appears and disappears with the snowfall each season, echoing the cyclical forces of accumulation and erosion. Like a snow cave, it feels carved away."
The entry not only seems to be carved into the snow bank, but in practice it will be a form which the snow collects around: and as the snow compacts and goes through cycles of melting and refreezing, it's likely to pull away from the structure, creating a gap between the snow bank and the exterior surface. The designers might have the best of both worlds, a snow tunnel that passes building inspection.
The formal design process began with a perfect parabola, which Nylen and Eldred sculpted away, melting the sides until they undulated like the scalloped overhang of an eroded iceberg or the zaftig shape of an after-the-party ice sculpture.
The designers wanted to keep everything as simple as possible, so the project has been an exercise in paring down the various elements. The sides originally had metal base plates, which were edited out, bringing the polycarbonate panels all the way to the ground . The door in the original plans was removed in favor of a heated walkway to control ice and snow underfoot. Nylen and Eldred wanted the entry to glow like a lantern, and they found a simple solution: a light tube suspended at the apex of the arches will illuminate the structure's parabolic curve to evenly diffuse the light.
By using translucent materials, the designers assure that the entry will be suffused with sunlight during the day, and at night it will emit a warm glow- a welcome beacon on a dark and snowy night atop Mount Hood.