ABSTRACT
The architectural project is a design of a small house, called Mask House, to be sited up in the trees near a cliff along one of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York. Fundamentally the project is about the manipulation of edges, edges that are found and edges that are new. The plan-profiles of the pieces of wood are calibrated to obfuscate the legibility of the side edges of the mask. Edges of consequence to an architectural project exist at an extensive range of scales, from the territorial to the material. The edge is a mode of description that has the ability to link seemingly disparate scales of architectural information. All scales can be described in terms of edges, whether they are the contoured edges of a landscape or the resultant pattern of wood grain constituted by the tracing of edges of wood fibers. The edge is a mode of description that privileges a given thing's formal and material order.
