Designing with Light: Case Study Diagrams Part 3

As I move through this design process with Corey and Melissa, it is becoming clear that the three points of the Long Architecture triad – Mission, Aesthetics, and Family – are going to drive some very specific design decisions before we ever get to a floor plan. The three are pretty well interwoven – for instance, the way the storytelling overlays the site connects to Corey and Melissa’s desires to live an outdoor-focused life and to raise children with a sense of wonder and a wealth of stories. This vision for their life drives not only the arrangement of the house on the land, but also the way different spaces will connect to each other, and how outside and inside will be connected.

Part of the couple’s mission is their wish to lead a physically active life, a wish that finds a philosophical expression in the ideas of Nutritious Movement.  The arrangement of spaces in the house we are designing will encourage movement, and the choice to replace traditional furniture with a module system will be the beginning point for the design of each room.

But what will the spaces feel like? Corey and Melissa have now visited several pieces of architecture around the country and much of our conversation about this has turned to qualities of light.

Refracted light, ambient light, filtered light, direct light, artificial and natural light; each of these has different qualities and each creates a different experience. The light in Stephen Holl’s St. Ignatius Chapel, for instance, was reflected and colored and had a spiritual quality that seems appropriate to the more magical parts of the house – the bedroom and kitchen, for instance; these are spaces where we slip into dreams and turn groceries into meals and meals into family dynamics. At the same time, the more social spaces, the more public spaces, do well to be open to direct light, unfiltered sunlight as much as possible.

I’ve made a drawing of how this should work in the different parts of the house:

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This is where Mission and Family meet Aesthetics. Usually an architectural plan begins with space planning. Here we will have to start with qualities of light and connections between inside and outside, then work our way up to the plan itself.

 Next: Details…

A House Without Furniture: Case Study Diagrams Part 2

Sit in the chair. Eat at the table. Climb in the bed. These actions define life in a house; they’re so common we never really think about them. It’s taken for granted that we will fill our homes with furniture. After all, how would we get anything done without it?

But late one night last week I received an email from Corey and Melissa. Our conversations had gotten them thinking about how they felt at odds with most houses, how the furniture seemed to restrict their movement and how they felt part of their mission was to move away from sedentary culture. Melissa in particular was interested in a nascent theory of physical well-being called Nutritious Movement. It’s a fascinating approach to being in a home that involved sitting on the floor as much as possible, using standing desks, and creating structures in the house that encouraged people to keep moving. In my research I found people altering their homes to make them more “nutritious”. People cut the legs off their tables, threw out couches, and piled boxes on counters to make them standing desks. These were home hacks in the direction of what was referred to as “a house without furniture.”

It may seem that the design of a house is independent from the furniture inside it. But so much of that design, from the sizes of the rooms and the locations of the doors, to the placement of the lighting fixtures, is designed with specific furniture in mind. What would happen, I wondered, if, instead of regular furniture, a house was designed with a modular furniture block system in mind instead? What would be a simple, flexible module that could become the base of a bed, a floor table, or a standing desk? Melissa had spoken about wanting her rooms to be open and changeable, visually defined by large open floor spaces. I developed a simple 12 x 12 x 18 box module:

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With an operable top and additional table top pieces, the module can do pretty much anything most furniture does, but at many different heights and locations. When not in use, the boxes would stack along the wall as window seats.

We’re pretty excited to keep developing this as we continue the design process. The aim would be to make it simple enough that the boxes could be cut in a simple CNC router layout and more could be made as needed. The modular boxes could then be shared with other people interested in Nutritious Movement.

Next: Designing with Light…

Realtime Case Study: Step 3, Diagrams Part 1

During the site visit we were amazed by the way our hike was structured like a Hero’s Journey. Thinking about the land this way opened up a lot of opportunity for turning the home into more than just a house and building a wonder-filled life in the woods. This is not just about the possibility of play and discovery, but how it leads to a sense of exploration as the organizing principle of a home. The Hero’s Journey narrative structure, with its movement between the ordinary world and the special world, is much more appropriate to this project than the usual public/private movement. I think of it as community and nature.

I’ve spent the past week drawing and diagramming. Each space in the house can have these two qualities. Forward facing spaces, like the entry and the mailbox, are all the way down the slope toward community. Bedrooms, those very private spaces where each night we close our eyes and drop into wild stories, would be further up the slope toward nature, into the special world. Other spaces, like the kitchen, mix these qualities. Here, the extraordinary magic of cooking is shared in the most mundane way with the family and with guests. I’ve graphed the parts of the home onto the site at the bottom of the diagram.

In it, you can see a couple of unusual architectural typologies. The first is the Fruit Stand. These small sheds can be found all over rural America. I don’t mean here to suggest that Corey and Melissa must now sell fruit but that this kind of structure is the most outward facing structure a rural home can have. In it, products from deep in the special world can be shared with passersby. Mailboxes and information boards function like this, as do those Little Free Libraries popping up everywhere.

Little Free Library, image by Woofiz

The other is the Folly, which is an architectural structure in the landscape with no specific purpose. I’ve located these deep into the special world of the property. They serve both to extend the functions of the house out into the woods and to map the Hero’s Journey more precisely onto the land. They can be used as the owners see fit – for occasional dinners, for playtime activities with kids, and, of course, for the telling of stories.

Overlaid on all of this are the stages of the Hero’s Journey. Yesterday we talked about how this could be applied over the years of a child’s life. We could write children’s stories that take characters on adventures into landscapes resembling the property, then the children could take those journeys for real and discover keys to understanding and developing the stories further. They could receive books in the mail as they reach certain ages, further unfolding what narratives were embedded in the landscape. We talked, too, about designing a coming-of-age ritual tied to these stories and to the land, which would be the only story to include the mountaintop (or the “Holy Mountain”), the apotheosis point on the Hero’s Journey.

I have a couple of writers and designers in mind for this; we’d have to do some reading together with Corey and Melissa, and then think about what makes sense on this particular piece of land.

But, first: thinking about making a house without furniture…

Realtime Case Study: Corey and Melissa Miller. Step 2: Site Visit

The site of Corey and Melissa’s house is a forty acre plot of land just south of Ithaca, in the Finger Lakes region of New York. It is an area with a lively arts and culture scene, as well as countless family farms and organic, biodynamic and community-connected CSAs. The area’s development has long been dominated by Cornell University, with its land-grant agriculture school and its perch atop the hill riven by gorges and overlooking the lake.

For Corey and Melissa, the easy connection with the culture of family farms and CSAs has been their entry point into this new community. “Everywhere that I’ve lived, the way that I’ve settled into an area is finding the food sources,” said Melissa.

The site itself seemed unremarkable when we first arrived: an undeveloped patch of woods on the side of a back road. But once we crossed the property line and the stream that defined it, everything changed. The trickling of the water created a sonic wall between us and the road, and immediately we felt ourselves in the world of the forest, looking out at the world we had come from. The site for the house was a small flat area at the foot of a long slope. We stopped here to investigate the tree types and the speckled quality of the light. Is this bright enough? I asked. Yes, they said. It was more like home, in fact, being in this soft light than in the direct light of an open field.

Then we went for a hike to discover the rest of the land. If the first threshold was the stream, the second was a thick, muddy bramble we had to work our way through before entering the deep woods. The soundscape here was completely different. We could no longer even see the road, and the forest seemed to stretch forever in every direction. As we walked, Corey and Melissa spoke of wishing to live here on the site, to be connected with it, and not to have the house be in opposition to the site as most houses are. They didn’t want the usual house/property divide. I could understand why: the site had a mythical quality, and as we ascended the slope and left civilization, that quality seemed to increase. Then we arrived at a pond and a log cabin lean like one I know I’d seen once in a book of fairy tales. Corey and Melissa spoke of their childhoods wandering in the forest and how much wonder there was in it. They wanted this for their kids. Was there, perhaps, some way that we could integrate that natural wonder into their daily lives at home? Could there be, as the children grew, a series of stories tied to the property which might reveal themselves over time, perhaps over a whole childhood?

The more we walked and talked, the more the property seemed to become the territory of a hero’s journey.

Progressing meant crossing a series of thresholds that led deeper and deeper into the other world of the woods. The deepest part of the journey was the highest point of the property, and, like Dorothy in Oz or Luke in Yoda’s swamp, anything seemed possible there. Then the journey back down the hill was a journey back to the future house and to the road and where people might be invited to come eat and get bodywork and play with kids.

The more time we spent on the property, the more it seemed that the house would do well to be situated at the threshold between the two worlds. On the one side: the generative quality of life in the woods, and on the other the engaging quality of life in the world. This approach seemed much more apt than the ordinary public/private divide common in architectural design. Where would dinners be situated in this spectrum? What about Melissa’s chiropractic office? Or Corey’s home workshop?

The most important thing we learned from the site, however, was that the home they were building would be much bigger than just the house. This opens up a lot of possibilities. Perhaps the “house” would be distributed among several structures at different distances into the forest. Perhaps programs might be designed to span interior and exterior spaces. We would never have come to this understanding if we had taken the ordinary architectural approach and focused on what looked like a house rather than on how they wished to live in this place.

Next: getting back to the drafting desk to start diagramming these ideas…

Realtime Case Study: Corey and Melissa Miller. Step 1: Research

The first step in designing a home with the Long Architecture Project is research. Lots of research. This is, in many ways, the key to turning the designing of a home into the designing of a life. What is the life you would like to live? How do you hope to engage community? How would you like to relate to the environment? What will your family look like, ideally, in five years? In fifteen? The research is as much for the benefit of my understanding as it is for the benefit of the client. The aim is for everyone involved to come to a new understanding of how they wish to live

Corey and Melissa Miller, a Physicist and a Chiropractor, recently left Washington DC to try to build a more intentional life, and to design a home somewhere more livable than the nation’s capital. They began The Long Architecture process by filling out an extensive questionnaire which asked them why they were looking to build a home, what their understanding of home really was, and what they imagined their lives could be years from now.

They’ve been kind enough to let me publicly document their experience.

Certain answers jumped off the page when I read the questionnaire.

Is home a jumping off point or a destination? Fortress, Laboratory, Lookout Post, Forum, Spa, or some combination thereof?

[Melissa] Destination/laboratory/spa – I find that getting home as soon as I can is always on my mind. If most of my days can be spent at home, with venturing out (to run errands, see friends, travel, etc) being a “treat”… having home be the “treat”…that would be ideal for me!  I’ve somewhat always been like that.  As a kid I remember that a school break didn’t feel complete if I didn’t spend it at home. 

What role do you feel the natural environment plays in your life? What role would you like it to play?

[Corey]… One of my biggest issues with living in the DC area was the lack of natural environment there. …the many parks and trails hidden away there… were surrounded by highways and polluted with noise, and the trails were all paved and overcrowded and typically also followed a multi-lane road. If I can’t look up at night and see the milky way, I’m not in a place where I’ll feel comfortable staying.

What do you find most beautiful? Least beautiful?

… I have a high regard for strong colors, artwork that makes me think….

This and the rest of the answers pointed to a very particular worldview focused on curiosity and nature, and the raising of a family focused on wonder. In this, the home would be a base of exploration and a hearth.

The Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle, WA, noted for it’s unique use of light to define spaces in a generally open plan. Image by Frank Majka.

Their research also involved visiting architectural sites. Oftentimes we know what we want but it is hard to describe it specifically, especially when it comes to architecture. Corey and Melissa expressed a desire to live in a house filled with natural light, but what kind? To dig deeper, I sent them to visit a number of architectural spaces where light behaved in different ways. They started with the St. Ignatius Cathedral in Seattle, by Stephen Holl. Then we continued with a number of buildings at the Cornell Campus, near to where they would be building their home.

A mural in Ithaca that Corey and Melissa found intriguing. They loved the way you have to keep looking at it to understand it.

We discovered a lot in this research. When we got to the site our research began to cohere into a bigger vision for what a real home would look like.

Next: We visit the site…