When Glasshouses Perform

With Ray we immediately started off on the right foot. Our values as to what architecture and the house should be were incredibly aligned. But we still went through a few hiccups. I remember being so happy with the first proposal I made that I was sure any change would be for the worse.

I particularly liked how circulation was optimized as no real corridors existed, which is reflected in the table. I remember making the kitchen bigger than expected because Ray had asked me not to design a dining room. I felt he was going to regret that decision which is why I created this nook in the kitchen.

What I liked about the plan was the symmetry and simplicity to it. Service areas where to the north, serviced to the south. The main space flowed from kitchen to living area with only 4 opposing doors facing this space. The central element housing the kitchen columns and the entertainment equipment articulated the space while offering a certain gradation as one enters the house.

If you read it from bottom-up, you can identify, exterior/interior spaces, service areas and serviced areas. This is a modernist approach which in this case tracks with environmental thinking. The south in this plan is located to the bottom, so it’s as if the plan was building a buffer to the north.

In section we could see the main ideas come to life. The house opened up to the southern aspect by having the slope of the roof mimic the slope of the plot. Towards the back we were placing the solar panels which also required a slope. Then we could also identify that spatial gradation from the serviced to the service areas.

Many of these ideas carried through all the way to the built project, but as projects mature some ideas where scrapped. The volume of the hall got integrated into the house itself and both kitchen and pantry where rotated and pushed into the buffer space. It took me a long time to accept this new disposition. I wasn’t convinced about the kitchen protruding into the veranda. The reason was that I felt we were starting to go against our own initial strategy, parti.

But architecture shouldn’t be imposed. This was what my client wanted. I could only express my arguments against it. On hindsight, I believe Ray was right. This solution seems less “architectural”. the protrusion sat like an eye sore for me, disrupting those clean lines. Yet, that protrusion changed the scale of the space. Instead of having one massive long and narrow space, we now had 3 spaces of different qualities which had more adequate proportions. This offered more variation, which translates into more quality. More importantly, this matched the way they wanted to live this space.

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