Upcycling a Boeing 747: Wing House by David Hertz

Modern house design is often about reinventing the conventional, and the team at David Hertz Architects Inc fully understood that when they decided to create Wing House. The property is located in glamorous Malibu, California, which places at its tenants disposal wonderful views of the nearby mountain range, valley and islands peacefully floating on the Pacific Ocean in the distance. In building this house, the architects brought together several residential structures created from the various component elements of the Boeing 747-200. Some of the key structural pieces employed include the plane’s main wings and two stabilizers in the tail section, which have been repurposed as the roof of the master bedroom.

This modern house design was created for the female co-owner of a Mercedes car dealership. The client’s brief asked for a building whose curvilinear shapes would recall the sensuousness of femininity. As such, the architects started researching means for creating a floating curved roof and soon found that the 2,500 square foot of a Boeing 747 would work best to achieve this effect. By resorting to this artifice, the designers found the perfect and most cost-effective way of maximizing the views, as well as created a piece that stands as meditation on “the obsolescence and ephemeral nature of our technology and our society.” Not only were costs reduced, but the negative environmental impact of a plane abandoned in the desert was cut down to close to nil. The architects basically recycled 4.5 million parts of a “big aluminum can” – a worthy initiative, seeing that “American consumers and industry throw away enough aluminum in a year to rebuild our entire commercial fleet every three months.” Other than using materials that are 100% post-consumer waster, the home makes use of other sustainable, ‘green’ features, such as solar power, radiant heating and natural ventilation.

(Source: StudioEA.com)