Near|Far House

Project Details

Project Description

FROM THE ARCHITECTS:

Scope of work:
Renovation of an architect’s single family residence built in 1972 with the for-sale addition of a new 1/2 Duplex and conversion of the existing single family residence into a duplex. Extensive on-site landscaping was included.

Project goals:
The owners’ were interested in a) updating the concept of historic preservation to include contemporary homes from the 70’s, b) a more urban existence and c) a for-profit expansion that would allow the owner’s to complete a comprehensive exterior renovation with energy upgrades. The new duplex was to be transformative of the existing 70’s ranch vocabulary, yet wrapped into to a single composition. Lastly, it was to be progressive in the face of universally dull speculative development.

Site:
A narrow, 70’s suburban cul-de-sac sited between a steep butte to the North and a golf course to the South that includes panoramic view planes of major Rocky Mountain peaks. Existing landscape includes densely planted, mature spruce and aspen trees on a slowly sloping hillside.

Concept:
A performance based, critical environmental engagement is seen as primary task of architecture of our time. Performance is measured not only as a quantifiable entity, as in pounds of CO2, but more inclusively, as a means by which architecture measures our daily lives. Sustainability broadened.

Architecture is situational. Better buildings have been able to extend their topographical reach, or be oriented beyond themselves.

Buildings allow themselves to be understood as independent images and at other times, recede from prominence to accommodate other issues; they provide a mediating role between landscape and interior settings, engagement and negotiation with natural processes, and a basis for everyday life. Buildings have the dual role of showing and serving, acknowledging and enriching existing conditions.

Near|Far House involves itself in the ability, or counter-positioning of a structure, to acknowledge a specific matrix of landscape engagements. Architecture integrates a vicinity. Less an object than a series of configurations, each is a hinge or pivot in a matrix of engagements.
Modern Painting, especially early cubists, identified congruence in the juxtaposition of typical settings of dramatically different scale and proximity: table, bottle, newspaper, distant landscape, weather and daylight - that create, albeit abstract, a more whole or ‘thicker’ experience. A table, table setting, window, light and sound and shadows are mutually and reciprocally intertwined. Both Juan Gris and Louis Kahn's images, identifies architecture's ability to sharpen and focus the distant and near landscape and their inherent inseparability. They are collapsed in experience and as a consequence of the process of articulating construction.

Near|Far House allows the imprint of the landscape field to impress itself upon specific architectural configurations. They include:

East: Close stand of slender aspen trees. The punched windows isolate a field of individual trunks and mirror the typical views, shadows and daylight one receives in this natural setting.

North: Red Butte rises 450 feet and encloses the site to the north. An upper clerestory roof is inflected to receive the profile of the butte, while glazing at the floor allows extension of the interior terrain into
the landscaped front-yard ground plane.

South: Windows|distant views exist through openings in ‘walls’ of mature foreground trees. South end of the house parallels the stream and is a single viewing platform|belvedere to both near wall of
trees and distant mountain landmarks.

Each orientation of Near|Far house is counter-positioned to create a specific engagement and reciprocity or contingency within the landscape field.

Formal Resolution:
Near|Far house extends the vocabulary of the existing 70's post and beam hovering roof planes; new planes hover as well as are folded, bent and punctured as a way of opening up the enclosure to specific exterior opportunities, engagements, reciprocities and contingencies.