It’s a house. It’s a very ugly house. It’s a very ugly house created for a competition by people who have no concept of aesthetics, let alone standard construction practices. Here’s a partial description justifying the brilliance of the design:
DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE
Faced with the typical house model of a “box construction” made up of standard industrialized components, we chose to build a clever house with systemic logic components, rising into what we call a distributed intelligence. This means that each component of the prototype contains the same level of technology, energy, structural, etc… With this we say that the logic of all is found in each of the parts, and not vice versa.
That is, distributed intelligence can be understood as the development in fusion research systems and materials, implying a change of procedures, multi functionality in the construction field. Opening the possiblities of digital parametric design from the traditional assembly of standardized industrial components of the home-computer.
In other words, they’ve not only designed one of the ugliest dwellings ever imagined, they’ve invented a brand new lexicon to justify it. Archibabble at its worst. Phew.
To be fair, the design is clever in one respect, that the shape was generated based upon solar tracking, that is, a computer model engineered a shape that maximizes the amount of surface area that receives direct sunlight throughout the day and throughout the year, thus determining the configuration of the solar panels. Win.
Unfortunately, the maximum efficiency is compromised by site orientation, its global latitude, and, um, unpredictable cloud cover. And it’s ugly. Fail.
[More info and images here via here.]
Tacky Raccoons 
Wow. That’s some ugly house. It kind of looks like Noah’s Ark. Wonder what it looks like from the inside.
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Oh, wait. I just clicked on the link at the bottom of your post and looked at more photos of the house. The inside of it is just as ugly as the outside.
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Leeuna– Yep, the insides compete. Nice private bedroom for two for a structure that supposedly houses a family of 8. With no apparent insulation, I bet it’s a big hot potato in the summer, and in the winter months it’s colder than the grin of your bookie’s bill collector.
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You know, even if it looked like a pig and was poorly built, you could at least say “Hey, but it looks like a pig!” Instead it just looks… bad. Really bad. I don’t think I could have come up with something uglier if I’d put my mind to it.
A cleverer and more uniform solar approach would have been a geodesic form, but whups, already been done.
Go to bed with a stick of butter and some garlic because yeah, you’re living in a big baked potato in the summer.
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Lemur– I can’t wait for the first heavy rains. Look at all the work they’ve gotta go through to patch the roof. This is one of those cases where you come up with a bizarre design and then try to justify it with b.s.
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It is not ugly. It is funny. Even nice.
But unfinished – the isolation is needed yet.
And dangerous – the production and use of plywood is highly poisonous by its evaporating glue.
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Tamas– Ugliness, just like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Not sure about your last statement, unless you’re talking about the manufacturing process. The glue doesn’t evaporate from plywood panels. On the other hand, plywood is an efficient use of harvested timber.
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