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Green-Roofed Arc House Cuts Noise Pollution from Planes

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London’s East Hampton-based Maziar Behrooz Architecture has come up with an interesting solution to noise pollution in this design. The site is located not just very close to a noisy train track, but also, right under the flight path of the local airport, with planes flying low and loud overhead.

The clients wanted to have a large, free-flowing space that was not divided up into small rooms.

The solution was to create an airport hangar kind of a shape to house the main part of the house, with an echoing green roof shape curved over the second part where noise reduction is most important, for sleeping.

Industrial technology informs the structure of the hangar roof, enabling a single large round high ceiling, not interrupted by lots of support infrastructure.

A central office anchors the bottom level, with curved green roofs on each side above the sleeping quarters. The result is oddly evocative of the airplanes flying overhead, both the curve of the green roof on the lower building, and the main structure.

Under the curved green roof on the lower building are the bedrooms and bathrooms, a garage and a gym, a sitting room and the garage, while its large square center houses an office.

Throughout, energy-saving glass that is resistant to the transfer of heat out of the windows, helps keeps the house insulated and warm in the hangar building.

The big arc of the main building looks out both ways to garden areas.

To get to the lower levels, echoing the industrial hangar technology, industrial elements like these stairs inform the interiors.

To prevent a sense of claustrophobia from developing in the below-ground part of the house, an all weather walkway which surrounded by glassed-in views to either side, takes you towards the stairs to the lower level under the green roof.

Once under the thick green roof, the bathrooms and bedrooms are what provides the extra insulation from the noise and the cold by a mound of earth and grass on top of the rooms, for the green roof. Windows at each end down here bring in sufficient light.