Rancho Rosudo

New Residential Project

Malibu, CA

2014

While technically a residential project, the novelty and uniqueness of this residential project warranted it’s own case study. Rancho Rosudo may very well be the first permitted residential, thin shell, concrete dome in Malibu, California, and proved to be an exciting project to be a part of. The reinforced concrete domes are formed over an inflatable formwork, to minimize environmental impact, in a process pioneered by Prof. Dante Bini, half a century ago.

The Laboratory for Sustainable Design was tasked with producing Construction Documents for the project, working under the direction of Nicolo Bini, AIA, the project architect. I was brought on as production lead to create the document set for the second permitting effort with the City. This current iteration seeks LEED accreditation and construction by C.W. Driver was scheduled to commence at the end of 2014.

No model is perfect, but some models are useful...

The complexity of the design made 3D modeling imperative, both to accurately quantify the interior volumes and geometries for documentation, and for visualization purposes. The models varied greatly from pragmatic models produced in-house to determine interior wall height and opening geometry to the hyper-realistic models produced and rendered for presentation purposes by the Client’s renderer.

The below images are courtesy of Binishells and show the completed project.