The question today is not whether but how architects can, in both near and long-term timeframes, develop ideas and techniques that effectively respond to what are easily described as dire environmental conditions. And the how often invokes technical solutions intended to produce measurable results.  There are, however, technical applications of ideas as much as hardware-based solutions. For example, pilotis, one of Le Corbusier’s Five Points of Architecture, fused ventilation and hygiene with liberating the ground plane for visual and emotional functions. Here, in this proposal for two octagonal houses on one site, a technical (i.e. resilience) urgency drives the motivation to lift them up on pilotis, yet a free ground plane comes with that move. With houses floating above, this open surface can claim a new identity not as yard, but as a kind of unprogrammed park-space, a blank canvas on which to socialize, play, or meditate – an investment in human activities rather than material (vegetal or otherwise) adornment.

But why two houses? Why green octagons?

We may not think of planning for higher density as a technical solution, but beyond urban ideology or bureaucratic decision making, it is a type of calculated performance. By offering two small houses instead of one large villa, the site is both designed for increasingly high costs of construction faced by families or social units that are (in urban centers) decreasing in size. Since the site is not bisected or partitioned in any p hysical way, (though the site is subdivided in the real estate sense) the site plan is based on a sharing economy and a promotion of interactivity and cooperation. Of course, relative to a normative street context, this is a deviant arrangement, yet the aim here is to offer difference in the form of social engagement. Perhaps the site could be open on Saturdays to all? Or a Wednesday afternoon for after school play? A little slice of Copenhagen would be good for any community.

As for green octagons, the shape operates on two levels: 1) relative to a box of the same perimeter in encloses more space with less drag on active environmental control systems and 2) because each house is located at the minimum 5ft side yard setback, the 45 chamfers of the octagon allow for less impact on the neighboring houses. They become more discreet let’s say. The color operates primarily within the realm of visual codes that are both real and metaphorical. Imagined in a lush, tree filled neighborhood, the houses take on a camouflaged character. As levitating, shaped green masses, they are a form of tectonic topiary. Even the corrugated metal envelope is meant to invoke the fine grain of expertly manicured gardens.

“Once plants have become machines – and even though not a breath of wind has ruffled the selfsame landscape equal to itself – every object changes and becomes a human sign (not unexpectedly drawing all the theories of language and sign systems after it).”

-   Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic

PROJECT TEAM: Neil Denari. Physical model and 3D printing: Hunter Blackwell, Nabil Davidson