The project site is a 73 acre farmstead, located between Side Road 30 and Grier Creek, adjacent to the Grey Sauble conservation area, near the village of Thornbury, Ontario. Along Side Road 30 are two large, formerly agricultural fields to the East and West of the farmhouse compound. Adjacent to Grier Creek, the site is bounded by forested land. The land is relatively flat so the horizon and sky are strong. There is a small bosque of mature trees just past the original barn. The basic site concept is simple: keep the tree-lined driveway and the Quonset storage structure and nestle the house into the land between the Quonset and the bosque of trees.
Thornbury, Ontario
Scot-Build Developments Inc., builder
N. Pitcher Designs, architect of record
A series of pavilion types and sizes: small, medium, large; open vs. enclosed; solid walls vs. glass doors. The pavilions are placed in precise relationships to create courts, gaps, axes, vistas, panoramas, porches, overhangs. The pavilions are built up from a simple vocabulary: blank white walls, square columns, glass doors, vertical wood siding, vertical wood trellises. The combinations and relationships of the surfaces and spaces create spatial intricacy through repetition with variation.
Living areas and the main entry are located in the central pavilion, which is flanked by pavilions containing the Kitchen/Guest suite/Bedrooms, a Master Suite, and a Guest Suite. Open-air pavilions shelter a carport, the main entry, and an outdoor dining area.
Ocean Club Estates, Nassau, Bahamas
Whittingham Design Consultants, architect of record
Pyramid Industries, mechanical
George V. Cox Co., Ltd., structural
CCMS, builder
Spatial simultaneity: massive structural columns suggest a Living area, set within a space defined by two walls + a bookshelf + a kitchen island, inside a loft-room bounded by the outer walls of the apartment, inside an even larger area inscribed by the full perimeter. You can walk through the shower that connects the two bathrooms, and circumnavigate the entire apartment. Finally, the space extends across the adjacent streets to the walls of the neighboring industrial lofts, and connects to the space of the City outside.
A full-height partition behind the open bookshelf closes off the sleeping area for privacy. Wall space is maximized to provide for display of the Owners’ extensive art collection.
Tribeca, New York City
Reveal Design Group, lighting
Guth DeConzo Consulting Engineers, mechanical
Eduard Hueber/archphoto, photography
Mark Brady Contracting, builder
Recombination of two river-facing apartments in a prewar Manhattan co-op building.
An empty hallway is reimagined as a Library, to link the Entry Hall to the view from the Living Room. The new custom furniture elements recall the transport-types that you can see from the windows: Library = bridge truss, space divider = boat prow, perforated steel radiator cover = automobile.
Upper West Side, New York City
Enco Construction, builder
A new loft-apartment addition to an existing historic brick commercial warehouse and a mid-century annex will continue the revitalization of a Hudson River town’s Main Street, while fitting into the scale of the adjacent residential neighborhood.
The project contains a total of 18 apartments—10 in the renovated warehouse, plus 8 in the new building, including 4 duplex apartments with mezzanine bedrooms and outdoor terraces. The new building’s apartments sit above a new parking podium, created inside the walls of the existing annex. A roof deck provides dramatic views of the Hudson River.
Dobbs Ferry, New York
Oceana Partners II LLC, developer
BRB Construction, builder
The Stone was an attempt to create a new event space and music venue in the shell of a disused theatre in downtown Binghamton, New York, as part of a larger effort to bring nightlife and activity to an economically depressed urban center. The existing Stone Opera House is a beautiful and historic 19th century building that has been effectively abandoned since the late 1970s. Given the advanced deterioration of the structure, the architectural concept was to provide a new prefabricated freestanding “Brass Barn” with a flexible event space and restaurant that sits within an open garden created by demolishing the dilapidated existing roof and balcony. The stabilized walls and facade of the existing building would be retained, and visible through openings in the new building.
Binghamton, New York
Project
Phase I: Renovation and site planning for a c.1800 farmhouse with outbuildings and an existing swimming pool. Interior and kitchen renovation, conversion of an existing shed to a poolhouse, new skylit well enclosure, renovation of garage into a modern barn/studio.
Phase II: The historic theme of the house is the periodic addition of open porch structures that are later enclosed to gain interior space. Phase II will extend this history with the addition of a new front porch and a new screened-in porch overlooking the garden. The interior will be extensively re-worked to provide a new room downstairs, new staircase, renovated kitchen and bathrooms, and an upstairs library-gallery space.
Pound Ridge, New York
Dapolito Design and Construction, builder, phase I
A c.1800 farmhouse is shorn of its later additions, and reconnected to its Barn, using a double porch and a glass box. A pool and tennis court with garden trellis are located on a terrace level below the main house.
As part of the full site development, an existing garage is converted to a modern barn + studio; a cellar archive for Artist’s work consists of a new railcar under the stairs (referring to an unbuilt train line nearby) and a salvaged chicken coop; a new orchard is planted in a rear quadrant, a new stone wishing well is built atop an existing Wellstone at the front of the house, and a small play-theater is constructed in the ruins of an old henhouse.
Proposed poolhouse of sliced pavilions, see: Rhoom System.
Pound Ridge, New York
Tim Lee Studio, photography
Enco Construction, builder
The renovation, restoration, and re-integration of a converted early twentieth-century brick commercial loft apartment building’s public spaces.
The six-story stair hall with cast-iron staircase is visually reconnected to the elevator lobby at each floor using full height walls of fire-rated glass. Light from each lobby window can now reach the inside of the stair core, transforming the experience of the entry to each apartment.
The renovated and enlarged entrance lobby contains a steel-framed mailbox machine, while a new steel entrance awning and channel glass wall cladding provide an expanded street presence for the building.
Meatpacking District, New York City
Gansevoort Cooperative LLC, owner
Reveal Design Group, lighting
Guth DeConzo Consulting Engineers, mechanical
A Degree of Freedom, structural
Mark Brady Contracting, builder
Project for a complete renovation of a top-floor apartment plus connected Roof terrace and reconstruction of a partially-finished rooftop pavilion.
In the Apartment, a new kitchen and bathroom core establishes a series of living areas and private rooms around it, and offers a number of possible itineraries through it.
On the Roof, Zoning restrictions limit the enclosable area. The solution is a series of sliding glass walls, folding doors, and retractable awnings that organize interior rooms, sheltered porch spaces, an outdoor bathing area, and an outdoor dining area, in response to changing light, time of day, humidity, and the seasons.
Meatpacking District, New York City
Guth DeConzo Consulting Engineers, mechanical
A Degree of Freedom, structural
LOTS+ was developed in response to the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s “Big Ideas for Small Lots” competition. While the primary focus was a prototypical infill site on West 136th Street in Manhattan, the competition also identified twenty-three small or irregularly-shaped sites across all five boroughs of the city.
LOTS+ was driven by the challenge of devising a rapid, inexpensive and flexible spatial/construction system that could feasibly work on all twenty-three sites, plus numerous others as well. The project proposes a simple Structural Insulated Panel (SIP) “building slice” (one typical wall panel, plus one typical floor and roof panel) that can be combined into multiple spatial configurations to create various new housing types when deployed against the various sites.
Additional images speculate on using the system to create entire new housing blocks, rather than just infill into existing urban fabric.
Design Competition Entry
Room + Rhomboid = Rhoom.
A series of prefabricated, angled room-slices (including floor, walls, and roof) can be nested for efficient truck transport, unpacked on-site, and configured into a vast array of possible combinations, types, and sizes (linear, layered, field, etc., from single cells to massive arrays). See also: Stone Wells, poolhouse.
Prefabricated System Concept
