Designed in collaboration with landscape architects Doyle Herman Design Associates, this project blends landscape and architecture, as expressed in both formal impact and lived experience. Located on a prominent corner lot, the design incorporates an eccentric roof, which appears to hug the contours of the site’s existing knoll, lowering its profile at the edges in deference to the scale of the surrounding neighborhood and landscape.
The division between interior and exterior space is blurred by the clustering of conditioned program around two courtyards. These pockets of landscape are visually linked but physically divided by a sectional shift, and are further defined by the projecting wings of the project’s z-shaped form. The fully programmed basement level, which houses spaces used primarily for recreation and athletics, opens onto the lower courtyard, thereby ensuring access to natural light and views of the surrounding landscape. The ground level, its central portion suspended above the lower courtyard, is composed of a shifting series of closed, positive volumes clad in wood. These blocks, which house specific programmatic elements, are clustered within a transparent volume of corresponding negative space.
Positive and negative spaces, combined, form a z-shaped bar that simultaneously defines the exterior courtyards and allows the landscape to bleed into the project’s interior social spaces. The second story, which houses the project’s private dwelling spaces, is minimized and contained within the taut geometry of an extruded gable roof, derived from the study of regional vernacular roof forms.