J-House

From the May 2019 Issue of ARCHITECT:

What do you get when you cross a New Orleans shotgun house with a loft and lift the whole thing above the flood plain? If you have a powerful computer, a clever engineer, and happen to be as good an architect as Ammar Eloueini, AIA, the result could be the J-House: an elegantly twisted steel-and-wood structure that rises out of a standard lot to catch the breeze, offer views of its surroundings, and provide refuge from the potential of rising floodwaters.

Eloueini moved his Paris-based practice, AEDS | Ammar Eloueini Digit-all Studio, to New Orleans in 2006—one year after Hurricane Katrina devastated the region—to teach at Tulane University’s School of Architecture. He quickly became part of the local effort to rethink how to design houses in a city known equally for its beauty and its vulnerability.

His solution, which he first developed for an exhibition on housing prototypes, liberates the stretched proportions of the ubiquitous shotgun house—a typology that was popularized in the area as a response to the city’s standard long and narrow lots—by raising up the bulk of the inhabitable area 10 feet above grade. But instead of placing the volume on stilts or concrete bases, as many post-Katrina houses did, he wanted to make the act of that elevation integral to both the building’s structure and interior. This idea developed into a design comprising two 11-foot-wide-by-21-foot-tall tubes—framed with 4-inch-by-8-inch steel members—that twist around each other, so that only two enclosed staircase volumes touch the ground.

Eloueini decided put his concept to the test and purchased one of those long, narrow lots himself. He even found a willing developer and investment partner—until the Great Recession hit. By 2008, the architect was on his own. He spent the next decade soldiering on with a local contractor, help from his friends at BuroHappold Engineering in New York, and money and time he freed up from his teaching and small practice.

The resulting house looks nothing like its neighbors but slides easily into the rather confused context that makes up the fabric of New Orleans outside of its tourist areas. Eloueini observed all the setback requirements and clad the house in charred wood which, though now a bit of a cliché in some architecture circles, works well here both by offering a sympathetic echo of the neighboring wood-clad houses and by protecting the structure against humidity and pests.

The house also responds to the long tradition of single-family houses as boxes that contain all their functions in abstract forms: “It is my response to [Philip Johnson’s] Glass House,” Eloueini says, “taking the type down to the basic spaces and to fundamental ideas about spatial conditions.” At the J-House, you park directly underneath the living room—perhaps more like at Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye than Johnson’s house—and enter through one of the two tongues that the house sends down to the ground. A staircase in a compressed channel of space expands as you ascend to the main living quarters. What you see when you get there is the view—both ends of the J-House are glazed voids.

The living area is barren of anything but a small line of cupboards and kitchen appliances on the south wall and bookcases on the north wall. “I’m pretty reserved and constrained, I guess,” Eloueini says. “Not just in details, but in needs; I am a man of little furniture and a lot of books.” The living space then flows east past both the entry stair and a set of back stairs that descends toward the rear of the property. It extends further toward the bedroom at the front of the house, where a volume housing a bathroom and powder room creates a modicum of privacy from the living area as you lie in bed and look out the floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall picture window. “The main structure is like a Klein bottle,” Eloueini says. It’s “a continual space of living that lifts itself up and lets you hover there.”

The back stair—which is much more mundane than the entry one—descends past mechanical equipment to a small backyard pool that is shaded by the cantilevered living room. On the other side of the pool is an existing structure Eloueini renovated into a guest house.

Now that the house is finished, Eloueini plans to put it on the market. “It served its function,” he says. “It was a showcase for me; it helped me get other commissions.” (In fact, he is currently building a larger version of the same design in Tasmania for a client who saw the J-House under construction.) “I spent a decade of my life doing this, and I love that space, but I don’t want to become fetishistic about it,” he says. “It’s time to let it go.”

What Eloueini will bequeath to whoever buys the J-House is a refined and simple structure whose complexity comes from one idea: a twist. It is a tribute to both his skill and his restraint that he has carried out that notion with such clarity that you can understand it—inside and out, and in all its details—as being a direct and masterful translation of that first move.

Project Credits
Project: J-House, New Orleans
Client: Ammar Eloueini, AIA
Architect: AEDS | Ammar Eloueini Digit-all Studio, New Orleans . Ammar Eloueini, AIA; Jana Masset, AIA, David Merlin, AIA, Dan Kautz, Jamie Lookabaugh, Surawat Hanthawichai (project team)
Mechanical Engineer: Comfort Engineered Systems
Structural Engineer: BuroHappold Engineering
Electrical Engineer: Ducote Electric
Civil Engineer: BuroHappold Engineering
Construction Manager: Ammar Eloueini, AIA; Jana Masset, AIA
General Contractor: Ammar Eloueini, AIA
Lighting Designer: Paul Bakis
Skylight Engineer: Super Sky Products Enterprises
Size: 2,200 square feet (main house); 800 square feet (guest house)
Cost: Withheld