CloudRock begins with an exploration of a 20 year-long intimate relationship between client andsite, and responds to her life-long dream of building a unique home that enriches the astonishing beauty of this extraordinary desert landscape adjacent to Joshua Tree National Park.

The new home materializes along a sculptural curved wall that weaves through the terrain, framing a distinctive scene of the site’s majestic boulders with each turn. Moving through the project becomes a sequenced choreography of the site.

CloudRock challenges conventional comfort standards through a dialogue with the existing elements on site: the curved wall dances through the landscape, circumventing endemic species (Joshua Trees), and providing shelter from the strong winds; the rising roofs provide shade, making outdoor-indoor life possible.

The project achieves the desire for a unique architecture within a tight budget by employing in unconventional ways, ordinary local building techniques and materials that were crucial in the midcentury modernist aesthetics of the desert, such as CMU block, brick, millwork, and metal roofs. Using exposed materials to enhance their raw character, CloudRock’s architecture coexists with the natural beauty of the desert landscape.