The original, gambrel-roofed home in Waldoboro, Maine was built in the 1980s and set back from the water a few hundred feet. The home needed a major update and expansion, and the owners wanted to really make it a place that reflected their family spirit.
This 20-foot-wide wood frame townhouse, located at the end of a row along a narrow side yard, had existing front and rear extensions. The building volume was selectively manipulated—in some cases through addition, in others through subtraction—to improve room sizes, sequences and adjacencies.
When Stijn and Annemie bought the listed school façade (anno 1908) with the vacant piece of land behind, they were already the fourth owners in a row. The other buyers hadn’t found a proper solution to build a contemporary house behind this facade.
The owner of this home envisioned a beautiful but comfortable single family home that could last for generations and facilitate their busy lifestyle. They wanted open spaces that connected and communicated well with each other where the interior and exterior spaces flowed effortlessly and also provided for elevator access to each level including the roof.
The design of this house is exciting in many ways. It is Manhattan’s first Certified Passive House, Certified LEED for Home Platinum and it is in a NYC Landmark district.
This project grants a new lease of life to the originally horizontal duplex building through a new vertical dimension, which offers both units individual panoramic views and aspects of the garden, at one time limited to one or the other apartment.
We are commissioned for a 140 m2 dwelling refurbishment located on Verdi Street in the Barcelona’s Garcia neighbourhood. The structure of the house has one drawback: of the 16 pieces that make it up, only 5 are connected to the exterior, either to the street or to the interior block patio, leading, as there is no additional patio, to a dwelling especially dark in its centre.
The Switchback House is a prototype for the new urban family, inverting the traditional row house in two primary ways. One, by replacing a stacked stair with a switchback stair, and two, inserting a dramatic skylight directly above the new vertical stair volume.
While considering the client’s brief of a two-bedroom, two-bathroom house, our design managed to reduce the overall footprint of the brick veneer house and provide generous flowing living spaces with deep connection to the natural suburban landscape and the heritage of the existing house.
The original Schindler Residence was designed by FJ McCarthy for a corner lot near the top of Potrero Hill overlooking downtown San Francisco. The modernist home was designed to capture light from all floors with plenty of windows.
In the Salamanca house project we have moved the kitchen to the center of the house and we have eliminated most of the corridor linking the rooms and suppressing partition walls. The distinction between spaces has been made with furniture.
Wutopia Lab was invited by Shenzhen Biennale to rejuvenate the building NO.4 and building NO.5 in Dameisha Village. The urban-village is a slum with Chinese characteristics. Architects hope to break the invisible limit between the city and the village through the activation of the site.
