Amey Kandalgaonkar envisions a house carved within a massive boulder.

Amey Kandalgaonkar, an architect, has made drawings of House Within a Rock, a project for a modernist concrete house erected within a massive rock.

Kandalgaonkar, who was born in Bombay and now lives in Shanghai, created the home to be a modern take on the architecture of Saudi Arabia’s Mada’in Saleh necropolis, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Mada’in Saleh was constructed in the first century by carving ornate façade tombs on the sandstone cliff.

“When I first saw photographs of rock cut-tomb building, I knew I wanted to utilize it as inspiration for an architectural project,” Kandalgaonkar explained.

“Past builders left us with a significant amount of architectural legacy, and I feel they did an excellent job of blending manmade surroundings with natural components.”

Home Within a Rock was created by Kandalgaonkar to appear to have grown out of the rock. A massive ground floor entrance shaft links to a vast, rectangular living room open to the air on all sides. Rough concrete slabs blend seamlessly with rocky outcroppings.

Its volume is topped by a terrace, which leads to a higher series of terraces and a swimming pool located on the top of the outcrop close to a covered penthouse space.

This terrace runs along the cliff’s edge to another swimming pool with glass walls and a bottom that cantilevers off the cliff’s edge.

“Given the visual intricacy of the rocks at Mada’in Saleh, it was critical to employ basic planes and cubes to establish visual equilibrium,” Kandalgaonkar explained.

“I sought to make the visual effect from eye level as low as possible, and the whole magnitude of the intervention is evident only when examined from a bird’s eye.”

Conceptual architecture may push the boundaries of nature and design.

Visualizer of architecture Alex Hogrefe created a hypothetical hideaway cut into an Icelandic cliff face, while Modscape, an Australian housing business, created a modular home that could dangle off the edge of a sea cliff.

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