A House on an Urban Lot
Group Members: Leona Chadwick, Patrick Jago, James Urlini
Architecture
Group Members: Leona Chadwick, Patrick Jago, James Urlini
Architecture
An Urban Lot
A vacancy amid a dense built assemblage interrupts the appearance of street facade and provides release from its persistence. Here, the outline of an urban site presents itself through an abutting fence, party walls, a footpath, and an alley. Narrow width and strict longitudinal enclosure make site boundaries explicit, legislative rows, informing an urban lot.
Brick and a wobbly timber fence demarcates one long edge and a strict masonry wall outlines the other. They share typological resemblance being neighbouring gestures, but vary drastically at the logic of scale. Confinement generates a certain permeability through the site’s short edge, open and exposed to the street front through to the rear. In this manner, site becomes backgrounded, even when you are looking at it, you see between, through and around it.
Found slab makes ground level apparent yet is challenged by the setback. Constrained by its legislative relations with its neighbouring walls, while seemingly cognisant, this territory defines the lot’s edge proper, a bond which must be observed on both sides.
Domestication
The confrontation of material, object and structure on the urban site acts as a framework for domestication: a process specifically considered: a selection, proportioning and directing of space. Material addition supports the continuity of built urban conditions, a sum of parts, while subtraction and alteration are equally required to transfigure area for use.
Acts of enclosure perpendicular to the site’s length and cover turn found slab to floor, domesticity isolating the lot from its urban environment but never divorcing it. Datums of boundary are adhered to and their conditions shared, a material presence on site reflected in the creation of three rooms.
Soil introduced on floor provides a condition for garden, granted autonomy yet controlled through maintenance. Plantings are located within the logic of the room while making visible and renegotiating their containment. They oppose their vegetative surroundings on the perimeter, the setback garden, included yet left unattended.
A vacancy amid a dense built assemblage interrupts the appearance of street facade and provides release from its persistence. Here, the outline of an urban site presents itself through an abutting fence, party walls, a footpath, and an alley. Narrow width and strict longitudinal enclosure make site boundaries explicit, legislative rows, informing an urban lot.
Brick and a wobbly timber fence demarcates one long edge and a strict masonry wall outlines the other. They share typological resemblance being neighbouring gestures, but vary drastically at the logic of scale. Confinement generates a certain permeability through the site’s short edge, open and exposed to the street front through to the rear. In this manner, site becomes backgrounded, even when you are looking at it, you see between, through and around it.
Found slab makes ground level apparent yet is challenged by the setback. Constrained by its legislative relations with its neighbouring walls, while seemingly cognisant, this territory defines the lot’s edge proper, a bond which must be observed on both sides.
Domestication
The confrontation of material, object and structure on the urban site acts as a framework for domestication: a process specifically considered: a selection, proportioning and directing of space. Material addition supports the continuity of built urban conditions, a sum of parts, while subtraction and alteration are equally required to transfigure area for use.
Acts of enclosure perpendicular to the site’s length and cover turn found slab to floor, domesticity isolating the lot from its urban environment but never divorcing it. Datums of boundary are adhered to and their conditions shared, a material presence on site reflected in the creation of three rooms.
Soil introduced on floor provides a condition for garden, granted autonomy yet controlled through maintenance. Plantings are located within the logic of the room while making visible and renegotiating their containment. They oppose their vegetative surroundings on the perimeter, the setback garden, included yet left unattended.
Site
Entry
Centre
Edge
