Invisible Barn
Barns have long been a fixture of rural life to the point where they seem to blend into the surroundings, becoming an organic piece of the landscape. It’s easy to forget that these manmade structures can have a ripple effect on the surrounding forest and meadow. That’s why the Invisible Barn, an innovative mirrored structure that blends seamlessly into its surroundings, has us so excited.
By Kate Dannies
New York based designers stpmj have made the dream of low impact rural architecture a reality with the Invisible Barn, a bird friendly structure that provides the function of a barn without the environmental imposition. Located in the centre of a tranquil grove in Socrates Sculpture Park in California, the Invisible Barn is simultaneously present and absent.
The effect is accomplished by a system of mirrors, which reflect the surrounding landscape, camouflaging the structure from view. From a distance it is largely invisible, save for several natural wood rectangles that provide structure for the openings in the barn. Visitors to the interactive barn can move through and around the structure, experimenting with its physicality and ethereal lines.
The mirrored surfaces of the barn open the structure to constant change as it reflects different aspects of its evolving surroundings. From darkness to light and winter to summer, the Invisible Barn takes on new dimensions of visibility as it blends into and reinforces the surrounding landscape. Re-contextualizing without significantly altering its location, the Invisible Barn prompts reflection on the intended impact of architecture in the modern world.
While the design is certainly innovative, the site chosen for it contributes to the overall effect. The grove of trees that houses the Invisible Barn is composed of closely packed trees of similar heights, which facilitate the invisibility of the barn by emphasizing verticality, blurring the boundary between the natural site and the illusion of the barn.
The landscape of the site also shaped the design of the barn, which demanded a long and skinny parallelogram. Only the plywood-accented openings give the barn away and these themselves are an illusion as they appear from a distance to be floating on air, inviting passer by to approach, inspect, and discover the Invisible Barn.
