Spring 2016, UC Berkeley | Advisors: Andrew Atwood, Renee Chow
Houses today are organized in a very regular, orthogonal and highly repetitive system. Embedded in this system are isolated spaces created by boundaries between street and house, between neighbors and between programs. As an attempt to break these boundaries, this project explores misalignment as a design strategy to generate opportunities for communal interaction in the form of collective housing. Through misalignments, property divisions are manipulated and social arrangements of the single-family living style are challenged.
In the San Francisco Marina district, strips of almost-identical duplexes line up on the two sides of streets, creating distinctive zones separate by the serial repetition of volumes, facades, walls and floor plates.
As these elements of a standard duplex unit are misaligned against the established order, distinctively contained spaces are interrupted and overlapped, opening up new spatial opportunities and creating richer mix of uses and collective living situations.
Initial studies include formal manipulation of existing duplexes through displacement and rotation, misalignment of tectonics elements of the architectures, and exaggeration of existing collective elements. These studies allowed me to use misalignment at different scales to generate more collective moments in a living situation.
The base forms of four duplex units are manipulated and misalign from the established regular order to create interlocking and pulled apart spaces, generating new sizes and gaining new natural elements such as daylight. The original architectural elements such as stairways and extruded bays remained in place, which are then further misaligned to remove redundancy and to allow unexpected spaces to generate behind them.
Existing collective elements are identified, manipulated and exaggerated through misalignemt: public collective zone bounded by the façade and sidewalk is extended into the duplex. Collective zones already shared by two individual units in a duplex are subtly displaced, widened, and extended beyond the boundary. Floor plates and parti walls that divide private collective zones such as living rooms are also misaligned to create connectivity in the space and generating a higher level of collectivity. These strategies combined produce a general form and spatial division for the design.
Going beyond architectural and spatial misalignments, materials and structures are also considered in this design. These types of misalignment are intended to relax the hard boundary edges created by the meeting of walls and floors. Edges of material change is unexpectedly unregistered with tectonic edges, thus avoided the reinforcement of the boundary, this allows occupants to question the boundary between tectonics, uses, spaces, programs, and even privacy. Sometimes this misalignment could be used to create useful elements such as tabletops and shelving units.
Because of subtle misalignment of forms, tectonics, spaces, materials and structures, occupants could constantly reimagine the use of spaces based on their how they enter and encounter them.
This design is intended for a 6 month to 1 year residency program for artist and art students, where there is constantly new people moving through the architecture, forcing the entire dynamic to change so it never becomes stale, stable or static.
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