cloudhaus: a hard scrape for the hardscape

One of the concerns I have with the cabin is someone (heck, it could be me!) sliding down the hill and crashing into the house. To prevent that, we'll need to have something for folks to crash into to prevent them from crashing into the cabin. Bollard is the technical name for these sacrificial features that hopefully never get used, and they don't tend to be architecturally interesting (see image above from Wikipedia). There are exceptions. Target does a good job of using giant, concrete red balls (from the center of Target's target):

 

image from Mental Floss

For hardscaping, the architects have proposed four concrete "steps" (it's pretty flat out yonder, so let's call them "landing pads") that are pretty dang cool. Initially, I thought the landing pads looked like this (I've greyed in the pads to help with visualization):

but upon further study, I realized that they are truncated at the ends:

which is even cooler! The plan visually establishes the edge of parking and introduces an angle, a theme for the cabin.

While thinking of the bollard issue, I came across this project at the Tucson Mountain Retreat by DUST:

Although soopercool (if not downright deadly after four margaritas...), it's a bit too much for our project, but concrete cubes of varying heights that organically fit into the project and provide bollard services seems the way to go. We want something that quietly complements the cabin, not dominate it.

I took a stab at what this might look at for the architects to consider:

What I did here is (1) create a grid inspired by the existing design, (2) flipped a coin to determine whether or not a square had a bollard, and (3) used the RANDBETWEEN function to randomly determine height (1 = 0.5 feet, 2 = 1 feet, 3 = 2 feet). I then added a half-square at the other end of the cabin.

Another option here is to fill in all the squares for a more formal approach with a "bollard" of 0 feet tall:

This approach may be too formalized--I don't know. 

I suspect the hardscape design needs to be revisited to respond to what has actually happened on-site. For example, the final placement of the cabin and the (correct) decision to not build a retaining wall along the parking area (which constricts the area). The design above extends ~19 feet into the front area.