Project: Live Work Home
Richard Cook, a principal at Cook + Fox Architects, surveyed the Near Westside’s inventory of vacant structures and arrived at a conclusion that would guide the design of the Live Work Home. “The last thing in the world that the Near Westside needed was another house, whether it’s green or otherwise,” he says. “What it needed was a new prototype.”
Cook’s team designed a single-story space with an open layout. Sliding doors and mobile partitions on wheels can be configured to create different layouts for living and working, eliminating the costs and landfill waste associated with residential remodeling.
Mobile sustainability:
The sliding doors were made in Syracuse by CabFab with a formaldehyde-free plant-and-soy-based composite board manufactured by e2e of Ithaca, New York. The mobile
partitions were fashioned from TimberStrand, an engineered lumber made from younger trees rather than old-growth timber.
cabfab.com
e2ematerials.com
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An unconventional exterior: The solar screen is made from medium-density
overlay plywood, a widely available and relatively
affordable material whose traditional use for highway
signs testifies to its durability.
Clad with fiber cement board and wrapped in an MDO plywood solar screen, the building doesn’t resemble a house so much as a small commercial or industrial structure—an impression enhanced by a garage-style bifold door that opens onto the front porch. A photograph of dappled sunlight filtering through treetops was enlarged and pixelated to create the perforation pattern in the screen, which is cut in places into swiveling panels that can be turned to create shade or to bounce light into the house.
The pine floor was salvaged from the dilapidated shotgun house that was deconstructed to make way for Live Work Home, and the kitchen cabinets were fashioned from wood from a nearby warehouse that was gutted to create condominiums. “It relates by story back to how the building was made,” says Pam Campbell, a senior associate at Cook + Fox. “It makes the building more related to the place and connected to it.”
Reclaimed
materials: Recycled building materials can cut construction costs while simultaneously forging a link with the past. “Be alert about what is being taken down
in the area and talk to homebuilders,” Campbell says. “There may be more opportunities than you think.”
Project: Live Work Home
Design team: Cook + Fox Architects and Terrapin Bright Green, New York
Size: 1,400 square feet
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