Project Three: Double house and a Garden

For Project three we were asked to design a building or 'Double house' in relation to a carefully considered constructed Landscape of Garden. We were told to focus on the architectural relationship between the two dwellings and each of their relationships to the shared garden. Furthermore, there would be the added addition of at least one public space and we were to keep in mind the architect we had studied in the last two projects when designing our building. The imagined life of the house(s) and the relationship between public and private spaces was of particular importance.

For my concept, I imagined a life of my building as an artists residency in the very young and trendy suburb of Potts Point in the heart of Sydney City. For my imagined life of the house(s) I pictured two singular artists living in separate houses yet sharing common studio spaces, function spaces and garden spaces for both themselves and their public audience.

To develop my original concept, I used a series of wooden cubes as spaces and placed them in odd formations to understand how the spaces would work on the very narrow plot of land that we had allocated. I wanted to design a building that took a modern day approach to Adolf Loos' ideas of space and a blurring between spaces, levels and rooms.

Figure 1: My conceptual model showing my original spatial plan intended for the building after testing dozens of spatial combinations.

Figure 2: My original conceptual sketch of the artists residency showing my scheme for an upper house, lower house and central public studio space/courtyard.