The Tilting House That Reacts To Its Inhabitants’ Movements
Two artists, Ward Shelley and Alex Schweder, found a very unique way of expressing the special relationship between art, architecture and landscape. They built a rotating house at the OMI Art Center in upstate New York. The installation is called ReActor, a name that perfectly captures the essence of its design.
The artists lived in this structure for five days. The experimental structure is a hybrid between a sculpture and a house. It consists of a 13.5 m long and 2.5 m wide timber volume balanced on top of a 4.6 m high concrete column.
The entire structure could tilt and rotate around a central point. Its design was symmetrical and the structure tilted and moved in response to each artist’s movements as well as the exterior forces. This unusual experiment was designed to show the special relationship between a house’s architecture and its inhabitants. The experimental artist’s studio had a timber frame and was enclosed by floor-to-ceiling windows. The interior was divided in half, with a shared bathroom at the center and symmetrical living quarters and balconies at each end.