Originally posted by rcstang88
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The Perfect Safe House
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The Safe House by KWK PROMES is located in a small village on the outskirts of Warsaw, Poland. Surrounding the area, many of the buildings are “Polish cubes” from the 60s and old wooden barns. The house was designed so that the homeowners never feel unsafe or exposed. The result is something of a modern fortress with lots of movable parts and secret openings, complete with a working drawbridge.
The body of the building is a cuboid in which parts of the walls are movable. When the house opens up for the garden, eastern and western side walls move towards an exterior fence, creating a courtyard. After passing the gate one cannot enter the house or the garden any other way but through the main door, waiting in that safety zone, for its opening. The innovation of this consists in an interference of the movable walls into the urban structure of the property. Consequently, when the house is closed (at night for example) the safe zone is limited to the house's outline. During the day, as a result of opening of the walls, it extends to the garden surrounding the house.
Accomplishment of this idea required a lot of technically complex solutions. The sliding walls (both 2.2m high, 15 and 22m long) are not the only mobile elements of the building. Apart from these, there are large shutters – all 2.8m high, with width ranging up to 3.5m, and a drawbridge, leading to the roof terrace above the swimming pool. A giant roll-down gate closing the southern elevation also functions as a movie projection screen.
All the movable elements are based on built-in electric motors. The whole building is a concrete monolith, while its mobile parts – for the sake of considerable size – are light steel frameworks filled with mineral wool. As a result, the building is excellently insulated when closed. The whole house and all movable elements are finished with waterproof alder plywood. It resembles wood widely found on surrounding houses and barns, which makes it fit well into the landscape.
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A lot that's going to do when hitler rolls in with tigers."When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." -Benjamin Franklin
"A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury." -Alexander Fraser Tytler
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