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Maybe you've heard of ORDOS 100? It's a rather decadent little project in Mongolia with the goal of building 100 villas designed by 100 architects chosen by DeYoung museum architects Herzog & de Meuron (because what Mongolia really needs right now is a luxury suburban neighborhood). The totally extreme "Inside Out - Outside In" Villa is designed by Boston / Hong Kong based firm Rocker-Lange Architects to take advantage of the wide range of seasonal climates in Mongolia by "creating an architecture which is interwoven with its surroundings". Translation: the plan blends interior space with controlled exterior space, creating multiple in-between conditions. But more importantly, why are these things always shown floating in the middle of nowhere? It's the suburbs.
An “Architecture of Milieu” no longer strictly distinguishes between its inside and outside – it rather considers itself as always at once on multiple scales inside and outside, as architecture and environment. Consequently architecture and its environment are thought of not only as “inside” and “outside” of one another, but as zones of possible relationships, in which “inside” and “outside” vary and shift to accommodate changing seasons and usage patterns. The “Architecture of Milieu” is an architecture of situation rather than site: an indefinitely expandable and differentiable ribbon serves as the continuous organizational strategy, inscribing zones of different degrees of interior and exterior space vanishing the separation between them.
· Inside Out - Outside In by Rocker-Lange Architects [Dezeen]
· Architecture Watch