HOUSE ON PLYMOUTH
THREE-UNIT HOUSE | NEW HAVEN, CT
Yale School Of Architecture | Spring 2019 | 12 Weeks
Instructor: Adam Hopfner, Joeb Moore
In Collaboration with Ian Gu, Rachel Mulder, Sarah Weiss, Sean Yang
Overlap Experiments
The traditional Yale Building Project is to design and build a house in collaboration with Columbus House, a New Haven based homelessness services center. Each of the three units will be a new home for a family or individual previously experiencing homelessness.
Our design starts with the overlapping usage of space in one’s life, especially homeless people, our client of this project. During the visit to Columbus House, a community houses homeless people, we were struck by how little room for error there is in the lives of their clients. This lack of laxity is balanced by the support of people around them, community members, volunteers, and peers. This design aims to strike a balance between these two characters, the garden space having qualities that lie somewhere in between them. It aims to avoid isolating its inhabitants in favor of a space that invites chance encounters and planned gatherings. The garden is a place to bump into your neighbor on the way to your door, but also one fit for sitting down and having a meal together.
The design inhibits the boundary between a sense of security and autonomy, cohesion and individuality, outdoor and indoor, and public and private space. The garden can be seen as a gap between these pairings where all of them overlap on top of one another simultaneously. The design has three stacked units with half room and garden on the other, the whole building being unified by a wooden screen, punctured strategically to provide light air, views, and privacy. Because the screen wraps around both halves, the design has a larger presence than its stacked units would have alone, giving it a larger presence on the street that is balanced with the housing surrounding it.
EXTERIOR RENDER