Tinker Toy

Far-out ideas find a safe place to germinate on Midwestern soil.

Credit: Farshid Assassi

Anchored in the Nebraska prairie like an abandoned spacecraft left to rust, Randy Brown’s house isn’t the sort of structure that can be replicated in Everytown, USA. But that’s not its purpose. This quirky outpost, which the architect describes as a “laboratory for experimentation,” serves as a testing ground for ideas that may or may not ever make their way into plans for paying clients. College architecture and engineering students have formed the on-site crews responsible for each stage of its evolution.

Dynamic spaces are a hallmark of this unusual residence, with its cantilevered walls, floating staircases, and handmade window frames of hot-rolled steel that were welded on site. Some of the most playful passages were done on the cheap—such as a scrap lumber partition that cost $320 to build and serves as a privacy screen around a toilet. Sustainability is an ongoing part of the experiment, as seen in the home’s insulated concrete forms, rubber roof membrane system, radiant flooring, heat pumps, and green roof rainwater collection system. Geothermal and photovoltaic panels are coming soon.

Fresh takes on standard living spaces often gel in a roundabout way. Take the pod-like sleeping quarters for the architect’s two young sons. “During construction we had designed fairly large bedrooms and bathrooms for the boys with a small study area and TV room in between. Then we realized the logical thing would be to reverse that, making the bedrooms and bathrooms small, and the play space big,” Brown says. “The problem was, we’d already run the plumbing for the previous configuration. So we ended up building the rooms up on a platform that allowed the mechanicals to stay underneath and accommodate the change.”

Credit: Frashid Assassi

The home’s most arresting feature by far is its telescopic living room, a projecting box that frames views of the countryside and provides passive heating and cooling, by nature of its deep overhangs and southern orientation. Clad in 12-gauge hot-rolled steel, the volume is very low maintenance. “I wanted it to look like a rusty old tractor in the field,” says Brown, who derives many of his aesthetic influences from the rural landscape.

Resting in the shadows of this dominant structure, you almost don’t notice the site’s original ranch house—the existence of which is what allowed Brown to purchase land in a nature preserve. Painted a neutral gray and connected to the rest of the house via an enclosed corridor bridge, it is soon to be gutted and transformed into a kitchen and dining wing.

“The house is sort of an ongoing toy I like to play with,” says Brown, confessing that the project has already undergone too many construction phases to count in the nine years since he bought the land. (It wasn’t until last year that he and his family finally moved in.) “Experimenting on ourselves has worked well and now we are using some of the elements—particularly the custom window frame details—in other projects.”