View Silo House

Architect/Firm: RoTo

Location: Paradise Valley, Montana

View silo house concept

Driving up through Montana’s Paradise Valley, I feel a strange calm emanating from the arid rocky landscape. Sculpted by violent storms and constant winds, these almost treeless mountains seem like no place for humans to be. And yet,  in this isolation  stands in an almost totem like presence a narrow wooden house. As I approach this sliver to the sky, its verticality reminds me of the tall round farm silos I encountered earlier down the road. I enter from the wooden walkway, head to the bedroom, leave the luggage  and ascend up to the kitchen . Exhausted after the long journey, I fix my self a warm cup of orange pekoe while gazing through the window at the mountains to the west. I then head down to the living room. With tea on one hand and Mark Twain’s book on the other, I feel the warm summer sun as I sit adjacent to the large cedar framed windows.  My  skin longs for more sunlight. So I climb to the mezzanine with its slanted southern wall and finally all the way up on the open roof. There I stand for an instant and consume the intensity of what surrounds me- the mountains, the river, the sun. Then I lie down on the wooden balcony and loose myself in the adventures of Huckleberry Finn against the depth of the endless jet blue sky.

Resources:

Greenberg, Randi. “Silo House.” Businessweek. 2005. Architectural Record. 15 September, 2009. [http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/aug2005/di20050801_119123.htm]

Archinect. 15 September, 2009. [http://www.archinect.com/links/detail.php?id=6208_0_26_0_M59]

“RoTo Architects, View Silo House.” UME 14. 2002: p14-19 [http://www.umemagazine.com/issues.aspx]

Slavid, Ruth. Wood Architecture. Laurence King Publishing, May 30 2005: p122-125

Alison Pride. “The View Silo House.” At Home, The Bozeman Daily Chronicle, Mar. 2003

Brian Carter, Christian Unverzagt. Michigan Architecture Paper One. University of Michigan, March 1996

Michael Rotondi, Clark P. Stevens. Roto Architecture. Rizzoli International Publications. 2006