A unique rural residential design created by Virginia Tech University professor Ben Pennell as a speculative project and aspirational nod to internet-driven 'DIY' culture has taken off after being completed last fall with help from several students.

Known simply by its address—300 John Lemley Lane—the design was realized in the rural town of Christiansburg and occupies three levels, containing simultaneous metaphors of an 18th-century London church, an American World War II bomber, and the watertight, planular-shifting multi-roof effect typical of a Japanese temple.

Layers of 'mega shingles' made from Hardie board add to an extended plywood frame to distort and enlarge its perceived mass in a palimpsest-like effect that obfuscates the building envelope deliberately, mixing 'pseudo-Oriental' motifs with its aberrant style and architectonics.

Pennell says these elements combine to issue a challenge to normative design concepts, adding also to the anti-functionalist conversation that includes names such as Sanford Kwinter and Peter Eisenman. 

"In my own home, those elements which one might consider useless, or anti-functionalist, or irrelevant to the 'design' of a house, I borrow from them, and others," he related to Archinect when asked his views on their theories and their bearing on his particular design approach.

"From Palladio, for instance, I take the idea of a dome, but also the cruciform-church plan in general - both elements had no prior functional or symbolic reason for belonging in the realm of domestic architecture, but he includes them in his villas nevertheless." Pennell continues. "From Eisenmann, I take the analogy of the tree, which is how I like to conceptualize his houses. You see, a tree was not 'designed' per se to be climbed on by a child; but precisely because it was not designed for them or for anyone or for anything (other than to collect sunlight), it provokes the imagination. Similarly, in my own house there are many small, bizzare spaces which are occasionally designed with deliberateness, but most of the time they are leftover side effects from decisions which occurred elsewhere in plan or section."

"It is these spaces, however, which are so delightful for children: the narrow kitchen pantry; the open air attic in the primary bedroom; the low-ceilinged alcove in the second-floor hallway; the oddly-shaped bubble window on the roof, the 'secret room' wedged between the dome and the small stucco-box bump out," he added. 

"These spaces naturally feel as though they were for them, which to a degree I predicted and wanted. The rest of the house functions perfectly well, I have to say: four bedrooms, four baths, tiled mudroom, the whole bit; but as Ruskin so beautifully put it, 'architecture is precisely everything which is superfluously added to a mere building.'"

The home is currently listed for $584,300 USD. Pennel graduated from the Harvard GSD in 2019 and has also lectured at South Dakota State University.