Octothorpe House, Bend, Oregon
Project type: Self-initiated, residential Services: Architectural visualization, still renders, AI animation
Some projects don't come with a client brief. They come with a set of drawings and a question: what's the full visual potential of this design?
Octothorpe House started there.
The project
The Octothorpe House is a 310m² residence in Bend, Oregon, designed by Mork-Ulnes Architects, built on high desert land that lost its ponderosa pine forest to wildfire two decades ago. The site is raw and elemental: sagebrush, bitterbrush, juniper, and unobstructed views of the Three Sisters mountain range. The building responds to all of it, four wings arranged around a central core, cross-laminated timber construction, and an architecture that's simultaneously rugged and precise.
We took Mork-Ulnes Architects' published drawings and built the full visual world around them from scratch.
The challenge
Self-initiated work is the hardest kind to get right. There's no brief to anchor decisions, no client to push back, no deadline sharpening the focus. Every choice, from lighting to camera angle to the mood of each interior, comes from the same place: a clear point of view about what this architecture deserves to look like.
The building's personality is the tension between its landscape and its craft. Rough site, refined detail. Exposed concrete and warm timber. Vast exterior, intimate interior spaces. The visual approach had to hold both ends of that tension without smoothing it out.
What we delivered
Eight renders covering the full range of the project, from the exterior sitting in its high desert landscape at different times of day, to the interior spaces where timber, light, and materiality do the real work.
The renders were complemented by a short AI animation, a sequence that lets the building breathe and move, capturing how light shifts across the facade and how the landscape wraps around the structure. Still images show the precision. The animation shows the mood.
Why it matters
This project exists to answer a question any architecture firm might reasonably ask before commissioning work: can you take our drawings and build a world around them, without needing us to define every detail?
The answer is here.
Visualization based on the Octothorpe House by Mork-Ulnes Architects, Bend, Oregon, 2022.
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