MCKINNEY HOUSE

Another way to collaborate with the landscape is to insert the house tightly into the trees and use modernist construction techniques that avoid touching the ground. In the McKinney house on Figure Eight Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Jacobsen runs a wood deck out from the perimeter of the house, letting people perch among the sunlight and vegetation and allowing the house to feel like it's delicately floating rather than subjugating the land. Decks are inherently lighter in feeling than traditional porches, which rest with a fully expressed heaviness of gravity upon the soil.

Where a mature tree stands, the deck has been built around it, amplifying the feeling that the house is subordinate to the landscape. In instances like this, the tree becomes more than just a tree; it becomes a kind or living sculpture, its form celebrated by being allowed to rise through the flooring. It provokes the realization that the house, which is usually conceived as permanent, has been rendered subservient to nature, whose individual specimens are temporary but whose realm outlasts the dwellings of human beings. Abstraction and glass, both used to great effect by modernists over the decades, can reduce a house's imprint on its setting. In the McKinney home, gable endwalls are completely opened up, diminishing the building's mass and also making the outdoors a more powerful visual and emotional influence on the inhabitants. In a house like this, people live outdoors much of the time, and even when they retreat to the interior; they still feel connected to the great outdoors.