[Ajay Manthripragada]
This project is a new house that includes a dedicated gallery for contemporary ceramic art. The form is a twenty-eight-foot cube, determined in part by the choice of a four-foot square porcelain panel for the building’s skin and surrounding patio. The clients desired a distinctly visible house that functioned daily as a residence but also acted as a backdrop for an extensive and rotating art collection.
For a small house, a relatively large amount of space is dedicated to transitional areas. The entry vestibule at the street corner, for example, functions mainly as an in-between condition, often displaying one sculpture at the corner. When it’s sliding door is open, the entry merges with the gallery space beyond. At the rear yard of the home, another vestibule, accessed by a door disguised in the tile grid, houses mechanical functions and acts as the more quotidian entry. A roof deck is accessed via a hatch at the top of the stair
that is contained within the cube volume of the house.
The deck acts as an extension of living space, adding almost a third to the house’s square footage. The compact footprint of the cube and its positioning near the corner of the lot also allowed for space dedicated to a rear yard. The coloration of the project is determined by the porcelain tile, to which all elements visible on the exterior are color-matched, including exterior window blinds and metals.
The house confounds conventional scalar relationships between volume and aperture. The positioning of windows is determined independently of the facade tile pattern; the two are at times aligned and at times misaligned. Three types of glazing exist: pocketing ( in which the window frames completely retract into the facade), flush-framed ( clerestory windows i n the upstairs bath and kitchen), and flush-frameless (at the entry). A skylight i n the upstairs living area is a three-dimensionally rotated version of the clerestory window, as evident in the section. The house embodies closed and open states by way of its sliding window panels.
In the completely closed state, the project reads as an impenetrable monolith with a corner cube subtraction ( the main entry). In the open state, the reading shifts to one of a hollow shell, at times rendered transparent by sight lines that extend through the house and connect back to the city. For example, when the sliding doors at the main entry and the rear facade are open, a view opens through the corner of the house and to neighboring buildings beyond.
Organizationally, the division of the interior i s based on a recursive diagram, with walls branching off a central switchback stair. Most walls accommodate pocket doors and windows. This is a conceptual doubling of the house, in which the walls also conceal infrastructural elements such as venting and downspout systems. The interior sliding doors and windows, as they change position daily based on the projects’ use, produce a shifting legibility of the form. The house’s image then registers its internal uses as they change. The internal division of space also ranges from differentiated to continuous. In daily use, most interior pocket doors remain open to allow for the spaces to continue into one another. Text description by the architect.
Source: www.manthripragada.net / Special thanks to Ajay Manthripragada for his collaboration and for sending us the project.
Photography by: Naho Kubota
