The concept of the single family house, as an architectural typology, allows design speculations on the scale of the private, the personal, the intimate and the individual, expressing the way architecture meets the artistic disciplines and the humanities to answer a diachronic question: how do we want to live together.
Residential architecture has been manifesting numerous answers to that question over the years, reflecting the social, technological and cultural changes that shape the urban fabric. Located next to the house of Richard Neutra at the Silver Lake Reservoir in Los Angles, California, the single family house project aims to contribute to a contemporary reading of the concept of a habitat, distorting the images of conventional modern living and challenge new ways to inhabit complexity, as a dominant reflection of contemporary life. By mutating and adapting a developed genre to the program of a single family house, an artificial landscape is being designed at the residential area of the Silver Lake Reservoir. A tension we inhabit.
The formal systems of the house are analyzed into a rhythmical accumulation of multiple rigid components, and a dense agglomeration of strings that bridge the different parts together, creating spaces with different degrees of enclosure and exposure. From the top of the site’s slope until its public view from the Silver Lake Boulevard, the house floats as a 3-dimensional garden, providing a gradient of dense embraces and inner yards, semi open spaces and terraces that open up to the view of the Silver Lake. Diverse bone components spread on a parallel array lift the house above the natural landscape.
