Wing House with feminine shapes built from airplane parts

Architectural genesis

The client of the Wing House, a woman, requested David Hertz Architects Inc FAIA to create a building with curved forms that echoed femininity. Another fundamental element of the project is certainly its location: a unique topography with panoramic views encompassing nearby mountains, a valley, and, in the distance, the Pacific Ocean dotted with islands. David Hertz envisioned an architecture that wouldn't obstruct the view, a floating curved roof that gently caresses the terrain

The 747 airplane as a compositional element

Indeed, given the compositional criteria, the wings of an airplane could be the perfect element to form the self-supporting roof of the Wing House. After thorough research, a Boeing 747 was chosen for its 2,500-square-foot wings, which, used as a cover resting on simple concrete walls, would require minimal additional structural support, maximizing free space inside and views of the landscape. The scale of a 747 is immense: over 70 meters in length, 60 meters in width, and 19 meters in height, with a vast amount of material available at a very economical price, less than $50,000. This, along with lightweight prefabricated components transported by helicopter to the remote project site, despite the transport cost of $8,000/hour, helped to keep construction costs lower than traditional architecture

No waste

Once it was discovered that no regulations prohibit using an airplane as a civil construction element, except for the necessary registration of the house's roof with the Federal Aviation Administration to prevent it from being mistaken for a crashed plane, the entire Boeing was purchased. The architectural team studied how to use each part of it in the construction of the Wing House, just like Native Americans used every part of the buffalo they hunted: the main wings in the roof of the main residence; the 2 stabilizers from the tail section in the roof of the master bedroom; a 15-meter section of the upper fuselage in the roof of the art studio

The Boeing in auxiliary spaces

The Wing House also includes a guest house where the remaining front part of the fuselage and the upper deck of the first-class cabin are used as roofing. The lower half of the fuselage, forming the cargo hold, becomes the roof of the animal shelter. The front part of the plane, with a diameter of 8 meters and a height of 13 meters, is transformed into a meditation pavilion. Several other components are repurposed into new decorative and atmospheric functions, such as the engine cowling becoming a symbolic fireplace surrounded by water