LOOP is a suburban house with a continuous perimeter circulation circuit and no internal doors, connecting all the program elements along a single curving line. Formally, the design starts with two linear bars, which SLUMP and twist in response to existing site contours. The resulting sheared condition between the two bars extends the interior circuit outside onto the roof landscape.
This 5,600 sf house for a couple with two small children is situated on a sloping hillside lot with panoramic northwest views. The house is Janus-faced: towards the street, a completely blank facade is interrupted only by an S-shaped exterior passage; towards the view, the house is entirely glazed, protected by a continuous perimeter overhang.
Formally, the project is conceived as two parallel offset bars which bend to conform to the site setbacks and sag to follow the existing topography. At the point of maximum tension, this sagging tears the bars apart. The final house consists of a single continuous surface which twists and delaminates to create three fluidly connected levels. Continuity is enhanced by an extremely open interior plan with no conventional room divisions or doors to interrupt the flow of the public space. Designed to perform as a continuous landscape merging interior and exterior promenades, a series of concentric circulation loops intertwine all three levels of the house – and linking house and site at selected locations.
On a more general level, this project investigates the architectural potential for a post-parametric constraint-based design strategy. The twin bars represent an arbitrary Cartesian solid with the capacity of registering a regular interval: 4’-6” in our specific case. The specific site constraints such as zoning, topography, and view are used to create a design environment. These parameters trigger an indexical process of deformation of the initial object, in which the generic abstract initial object gradually adjusts and conforms to the specifics of its situation.
