Steep sites with limited buildable areas have always proved challenging for architects, but this home aims to navigate rocky terrain by breaking up a single dwelling into stair-connected segments.

Designed by Igor Sirotov, the PS1 House is a private residence to be built onto a series of stone lips that span from the lake’s surface below to access points above.

Weathered steel and concrete blend the buildings into the landscape while physically linking them via steps and railings as well.

The idea was driven in part by a desire to minimize the building’s footprint and need to alter the natural landscape, taking advantage of existing natural formations.

The design borrows from Modernist and Brutalist camps, austere but materially rich with aging in mind.

Steel frames and stone floors match the color and pattern palettes of surrounding site elements, providing semi-permeable shelters for bedrooms, kitchens and dining spaces at intervals between the top and bottom.

Located along a tectonic fault, the town of Hollister, California, acts like an earthquake in slow motion, its surfaces slipping past one another along a ragged line visible in everything from skewed traffic lines and split sidewalks to entirely torqued houses.

As Geoff Manaugh neatly summarizes on BldgBlog, “Hollister is an inhabitable catalog of misalignment and disorientation, bulging, bending, and blistering as it splits right down the middle.” Thanks to inexorable forces of geology at work far below, “The entire west half of Hollister is moving north along the Calaveras Fault, leaving its eastern streets behind.”

Instead of the sudden and devastating motion we normally associate with earthquakes, Hollister suffers the movements of rocks below at more geological than human speeds, its buildings and infrastructure ever-so-slowly twisted through the passage of time. At a rate of one inch per five years, the change is not noticeable on a daily basis, but dramatic over the decades.

There are elements of Alice’s Wonderland all over the urban landscape: “Curbs at nearly the exact same spot on opposite sides of the street are popped out of alignment. Houses too young to show this level of wear stand oddly warped, torqued out of synch with their own foundations, their once strong frames off-kilter. The double yellow lines guiding traffic down a busy street suddenly bulge northward—as if the printing crew came to work drunk that day—before snapping back to their proper place a few feet later.”

Manaugh also traveled to a nearby bridge in Parkfield where a road bridge spans the San Andreas Fault, its distortions the ultimate manifestation of fault creep as each anchored side moves in the opposite direction. Built straight across, curves are already visible as one sights along the structure.

His photos here and elsewhere capture many of the region’s “minor landmarks for the seismic tourist,” which, “for all their near-invisibility, visiting can still provide a mind-altering experience.” All images by Geoff Manaugh.

Good home design is not just about a perfect product but about process and context, as illustrated in this case through diagrams, videos and photos of how to make a small space work on multiple levels in Madris, Spain (both physically and proverbially).

MYCC (images by  Elena Almagro) managed to fit in a full bathroom, living room, kitchen, bedroom and office into this curiously-shaped urban shelter, narrow yet also relatively deep and tall (approximately: 2 meters wide, 10 meters long and 5 meters high).

A minimal combination of stairs and ladders connect the different platforms within the resulting studio, set out of the way and rendered partially transparent (staircase sans risers) or set off to the side (ladder along the wall) to help leave open lines of sight between various rooms.

A large skylight directly illuminates the work space, and, indirectly, the rest of the unit as well. The lack of horizontal space limited opportunities for plan-level complexity, but opened up spatial options in section as the dimensional diagram outline shows below.

A quirky animated video takes viewers on a short tour of the conceptual design process, starting with the entry level then splitting off to show how the various floors, nooks and crannies took shape.