Olson Kundig

This summer, Olson Kundig will contribute a one-of-a-kind children’s playhouse to Dreams Happen, the major biennial fundraising event for Rebuilding Together Peninsula in Redwood City, California. This non-profit organization is dedicated to rehabilitating homes and community facilities for low-income neighbors across the San Francisco Bay Area. Invited to participate by our friends at Facebook, the event pairs architects with local builders to create imaginatively designed, life-sized playhouses that are then auctioned at the Dreams Happen Gala on June 3, 2017. The playhouses will be exhibited for the month leading up to the gala at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California.

“Lacuna,” Olson Kundig’s Dreams Happen Playhouse, is a floating dreamscape brought to life. Blurring the boundaries between structure and sculpture, “Lacuna” offers a space of refuge for children as an elevated wooden cocoon, while also functioning as a luminous, abstract landscape sculpture. An interior steel frame covered with crisscrossing cedar beams creates a form reminiscent of an egg in a nest, with an LED-illuminated ladder providing access to the interior “yolk.” This ladder marks the transition from the earth below to the imaginative realm of the playhouse above, creating a soft glow that evokes a sense of the otherworldly.

Architectural Team: Christian Poules and Jordan Leppert
General Contractor: Level 10 Contractors