Built from a number of stacked “tunnels”, the Culvert Guesthouse by @nendo_official has gone to great lengths to obscure its complexities, appearing to be nothing more than a few basic extrusions drawn on a napkin sketch. In reality it’s much more sophisticated. There aren’t any visible joints between the separate volumes, nor obvious frames around the windows. Even the doors inside appear to float in space. The tunnels are made from precast concrete sections joined together by a number of internal cables along their length, each tensioned to a force of 46 tonnes. Engineering feats like that are necessary when you want to hold a house together with multiple cantilevers in an earthquake prone region. Hiding all that work behind a seamless exterior makes things doubly complicated, but the result is the ultimate expression of deceptive simplicity, as though it were casually arranged from jenga blocks by a child on the living room carpet. Photos via @nendo_official Words by @therealalfiemunkenbeck for @type7