This two-story, sixteen-hundred-square-foot addition connects an eighteenth-century saltbox house to the surrounding landscape with biomorphic forms that create smooth, supple interior and exterior surfaces. The design, with its sinuous curves that wrap the interior space like skin, manifests the impact of digital technologies on architectural practice at the turn of the 21st century. Architects have gained the ability to produce organic, bloblike structures that can register infinite variations and mutations.

With animation software called Maya, Kolatan and Mac Donald have developed a process in which the design development ties directly into manufacturing. Computerized milling machines cut the plywood rib framing; after assembly, the ribs are sprayed with a liquid membrane that dries to provide structural rigidity.