Sitting below King’s Rock, Piatra Craiului, the “Chess House” shifts three pieces and articulates their movement orthogonally, with each volume hooking, forking and bridging along an implied grid. The client is an avid fan, the game itself helping tie the family structure together through years of play. Further bridging the volumes and expressing the vernacular inspired chalet is an innate materiality common to the Transylvanian countryside. It is here “beyond the woods” that these carved pieces of stone and wood transform into high pitched, curved, mimetic, almost mythic forms.

Between these two materials, stone and wood, poche and light, a layer of fog blankets the mountainside and blurs the boundaries between the house’s foundation and its roof. It is this blurred boundary which generates the collage, one in which layers of acrylic panel and light overlap with one another into a layered form of “building as drawing.” The primary path of circulation leads to stairs that take on characteristics special to each “piece.” The stairs ascend into the cerebral interiors of private bedrooms where we contemplate our next moves; either playing in solitude or with a partner. It is in this perch of refuge that we’re closest to that jagged, sawtooth peak, closest to king’s rock.

Common to many regions in Romania, handicrafts such as weaving and textiles play a heavy role in establishing cultural myths and symbology. Often these textiles are expressed through pixelated diamond patterns, repeated rectangles. It is Overhead’s goal to quite literally evoke the pattern of an alternating board as a “social fabric” one in which weavers illustrate cultural traditions and vernacularisms through the commonality of pattern making. This kind of symbology is used heavily throughout the home not only as an homage to the game, but in this local tradition of image making through that pixelated, woven language. It is this language that weavers speak and communicate with one another, not only binding together the present community through the act of weaving, but strengthening the fibers of the future community by preserving a physical heritage.