Located on a barrier island off the coast of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, Loblolly House seeks to deeply fuse the natural elements of its site to architectural form. Positioned between a dense grove of loblolly pines and a lush foreground of saltmeadow cordgrass and the bay, the architecture is formed about and within the elements of trees, tall grasses, the sea, the horizon, the sky and the western sun that define the place of the house. Timber foundations minimize the footprint and provide savannah-like views of the trees and the bay, and the staggered boards of the east Façade evoke the solids and voids of the forest.

Loblolly House proposes a new, more efficient method of building through the use of building information modelling (BIM) and integrated component assemblies. The aluminium frame, comprised of Bosch Rexroth aluminium framing, is bolted together as opposed to welded, creating a structural system for the house which can be disassembled without affecting the capacity of beam and column components to be reconnected. The bolted scaffold serves as a frame into which off-site fabricated kitchen, bathroom and mechanical blocks, and floor and wall cartridges are inserted without the use of permanent fasteners or wet connections. Upon disassembly cartridges and blocks are removed as whole units and column/beam scaffold sections are unbolted.

The Loblolly House preserves embodied energy with the easy disassembly and reassembly of its essential elements. The disassembly and redeployment potential is evident in the detailing and quality craftsmanship of the energy intensive scaffold, blocks, cartridges, and service spines. This ensures a design-for-disassembly strategy, where the components with the highest embodied energy can be disassembled and redeployed with a minimal loss of energy.