Silver Sustainable Products, Projects and Green Design · 2026
Floating House Residential Architecture
- A' Design Award 2026 Silver Winner in Sustainable Products, Projects and Green Design
- Awarded April 15, 2026
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 19,490
- Verification code 990A61CEF0 · Verify this award
About Floating House Residential Architecture
The Floating House is a three-level home located in the Central Valley of Costa Rica. The building measures about 400 square meters and is placed on a sloping hillside site. Passive design strategies guide the project, including site-specific positioning and the use of natural resources. Industrial and prefabricated building techniques are combined with locally harvested and regenerative materials. Large roof overhangs protect the spaces below from rain and solar radiation. Solar energy is collected on the roof. Terraced gardens and balconies face the surrounding landscape.
Oliver Schütte's Floating House Residential Architecture exemplifies a sophisticated engagement with tropical modernist principles, wherein the building emerges as a delicate negotiation between constructed geometry and the enveloping verdant landscape. The design appears to extend traditions established by mid-century masters who sought to dissolve boundaries between interior and exterior realms, here reinterpreted through contemporary sustainable building practices and regional material expressions. The commanding cantilevered roof plane, with its warm timber soffit radiating amber luminosity against the evening sky, suggests both sheltering protection and weightless levitation, achieving the paradox of massive presence with visual lightness that distinguishes accomplished architectural work. Technical mastery reveals itself in the honest expression of the steel structural frame, where slender black columns support the expansive roof overhang with apparent effortlessness, while the building mass cascades down the hillside terrain in carefully choreographed volumetric steps. The chromatic sophistication demonstrates sensitivity to the interplay between natural and artificial light, capturing that liminal moment when interior warmth glows against the cooling atmospheric envelope of tropical twilight. Material choices speak to regional appropriateness and sustainable consciousness, with corrugated metal, exposed steel, timber, and stucco combining in a palette that acknowledges industrial production while achieving refined residential scale and warmth. The singular vermillion door provides a welcoming focal point that guides the eye along the ascending pathway, suggesting threshold and arrival with subtle chromatic emphasis. One might observe how the architecture frames views of the surrounding forest canopy while simultaneously inviting the landscape to penetrate the built envelope, achieving the integration of nature and dwelling that defines successful tropical design. The viewer is invited to contemplate how architecture might honor its site while providing sanctuary, and how sustainable practice can produce spaces of genuine beauty and emotional resonance.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- The Floating House is located in the Central Valley of Costa Rica, which houses the Greater Metropolitan Area with about sixty percent of the national population. In this context, the project creates a suburban oasis on a beautiful hillside location. Hanging gardens and balconies provide the home owners with spectacular views of the surrounding landscape, while large roof overhangs protect the individual spaces from rainwater and solar radiation. Solar energy is harvested on top of the roof.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The three-level building measures about 400 square meters in total. Floating light-frame structures are contrasted by service areas that are built onto the sloping terrain. Social spaces in the center of the house are opening up to the surrounding gardens of the property. The project is based on passive design strategies such as site-specific positioning and the use of natural resources. Industrial building techniques are combined with locally harvested and regenerative construction materials.
- Tags
- Architecture, Bioclimatic, Climate, Cocreation, Design, Development, Modularity, Prefabrication, Sustainability, Regeneration, Residential, Tropical, Zero emission, Zero footprint
- Production Technology
- The Floating House combines prefabricated and local building techniques. Its ground floor transitions from a sloped site condition to the terraced building geometry. Private rooms at the top float above a sandwiched garden level, resulting in three different conditions that are vertically stacked on top of each other. Large glass doors and sliding walls are designed to dynamically moderate the relationship among interior and exterior spaces, according to the necessities of rainy or dry season.
- Design Challenge
- The main challenge of the No Footprint House series, including the Floating House as an expression of its ongoing material development progress, is to unite a broad variety of entities in a joined multistakeholder approach. Such broadness and systemic thinking are required to find solutions for some of the greatest challenges of our time, which includes the lowering and leveling of emissions in all sectors that significantly contribute environmental contamination.
- Project Duration
- The actual duration of each project from the NFH series depends on the specific building size and its respective location. Beyond the building of individual homes, the NFH framework engages in strategies of sustainability and regenerative development. This includes, for example, topics like reforestation, the creation of food forests, permaculture, local energy production and a continuous life cycle improvement. The duration of these aspects can be described as ongoing and potentially endless.
- Operation Flow
- The Floating House is designed according to the principles of bioclimatic architecture and passive design strategies. Industrial building techniques combine with locally harvested and regenerative construction materials. The project is based on the research of the No Footprint House, a modular building system that allows for a broad variety of residential typologies. The larger project framework engages with academia and industry to cocreate sustainable and regenerative building solutions.
- Research
- Costa Rica has shifted from a strategy of sustainability to regenerative development. In this context, the ongoing No Footprint House series, the NFH project, drives innovation through the development and incorporation of renewable and locally sourced building materials in combination with passive design strategies and local energy production. The project is optimized through industrial and prefabricated building techniques, the first of its kind in Central America.
- Inspiration
- The Floating House is inspired by its surrounding landscape and the local tropical climate. A series of interrelated volumes and outside spaces are placed according to the logic of the target site. Ample roof overhangs follow the sloped site condition, protecting all spaces below while revealing spectacular views onto the Costa Rican capital San Jose. Interior rooms merge with their surrounding exterior gardens, creating a balanced and harmonic relationship of nature and the built environment.
- Image Credits
- A-01 / Garcia Lachner
- Patents
- Copyrights to all building and interior designs belong to A-01 (A Company / A Foundation)