Firehouse 12 Apartment

Project Details

Project Description

Working closely with the client, the design team reclaimed a decaying urban artifact: an early 20th-century firehouse located in the heart of New Haven’s 9th Square. For four decades, the building had been a signpost of urban blight, and through a series of successive renovations the design team reinvigorated this historic structure and reconnected it to the surrounding neighborhood. After coordinating a careful stabilization of the structure, the design team wove a series of public and private spaces throughout the building. The centerpiece of the building is 85 seat proscenium performance hall which doubles as an acoustically isolated soundstage and live-room. This central element of the project serves to define the spaces around it; a public lobby at the street which opens down into a foundation-level public cafe and bar, a "back of house" area for performers, an office for the studio manager, and a 5 bedroom apartment and roof terrace. Throughout the design, the designers strove to highlight the architectural integrity of the original shell of the building through its contrast with the exciting public character of its new function. The 5 bedroom apartment presented a unique challenge. During a previous renovation, the design team transformed the firehouse’s attic space into a residential loft, but the success of the building’s in-house recording studio created increasing demand to accommodate the musicians-in-residence on-site. The owner asked the design team to transform the residential loft into a musicians’ dormitory by adding three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a lounge. Lacking sufficient space in the existing building shell, and working within a modest construction budget, the design team proposed a 650 square foot rooftop addition constructed from structural mass timber. Taking advantage of timber’s high strength to weight ratio and the possibility to fabricate large panels off-site in New Hampshire, the design team developed an innovative, prefabricated structural assembly anchored to the existing masonry building via a horizontal steel truss. Thanks to prefabrication and careful coordination, carpenters assembled the structural timber components on-site in less than 12 hours, reducing the building’s overall construction time to 7 months. Completed in 2016, this is one of the first buildings in the United States to utilize cross-laminated timber throughout the building structure, featuring exposed structural timber throughout the interior spaces. Wood’s natural hygroscopic characteristics help regulate interior humidity and create acoustically live spaces for the musicians to practice between recording sessions.