Credits
From Slade Architecture
This house is for a young family with two children. They are very interested in the larger community and plan on sharing their exterior spaces with the community. They intend to create a day care for neighborhood children. The site is perfectly matched with the client’s intentions; it is the last house in a row of houses. It is the point of rupture between the clearly defined front and back yard spaces; the point at which the continuous façade of the row ends. The public and private territories are not as clear as on other sites within the row.
We chose to break the row into fragments rather than just extending the row “wall” to the end of the site. Placing the main house at the western end of the site allows passage between the front and back yards and creates an outdoor space open to the street within the depth of the row house. Separating the main house volume allows us to play with the relationship between landscape and building. Softened and rounded to be somewhere between the rigid orthogonal geometry of the row and the smooth contours of the landscape, the main volume is difficult to categorize.
Is it a rock or a building?