Fall 2023 • In Collaboration with Ben Elmer
The project began with the proverbial box house, a pervasive typology with a particular aesthetic and phenomenological expression.
Situated in Patagonia, Argentina, typical contextual factors were backgrounded in favor of an introverted and contained experience.
Situated in Patagonia, Argentina, typical contextual factors were backgrounded in favor of an introverted and contained experience.
Part one of the series presents the box house as a site for intervention. However, the prerogative was to not touch the existing house,
only the half that was chosen to remove.
only the half that was chosen to remove.
As an important cultural practice, butchery presented an interesting way to develop a new type of domestic environment.
Techniques, textures, and formal languages from the various types of meats and cuts inspired a different kind of architecture; one that is not
necessarily living or dead, but one that is spawned from the very material that constitutes the way we live.
Another prerogative of the project was to replace the missing program of the now-half box house. In the Mills precedent home, one of the main features of the domestic space is a bathroom. In redefining this original conceptual aim, an outhouse became a cheeky realization of this ‘renovation’.
In the project, the outhouse becomes an estranged version of itself, with proportions and a stance that is slightly off. Also, the primitive shape language from the main house bleeds into it, furthering the motif of these spheres as void objects imposed by the alien-like meat language.
In certain areas, the fleshy areas become foregrounded, as the interface between occupant and architecture changes.
Tertiary systems are mediated through the dissolution of various layers of material, as if the underlying structure of the drywall is actually meat.