Doors, Rooms, Passages
Designed as a mixed-use neighborhood in Hackney Wick, London, this project challenges the insular and cellular nature of modern domestic rooms by embracing the interconnectedness of spaces. Robin Evans’ Figures, Doors, and Passages provides a theoretical reference for the plan-making of this project, which promotes traffic from room to room and the “unavoidable intercession of people’s day-to-day life”. Through this principle, a new typology of housing with a system of bi-lateral enfilade emerges. Liberation from the corridor, the system manipulates doors to elevate rooms to be twofold: inhabitable and passable, encroaching the sacred boundary of privacy. “Rooms as passages”, thereby, is a statement against the modern advocate for maximal privacy, comfort, and independence in domestic buildings.
Cross Laminated Timber could not be a better material for this motif. It not only provides an opportunity to cultivate carbon neutral construction in midrises, but also allows the threshold of the enfilades to be beam-less, endowing the architecture with a conspicuous timber language and maximal spatial porosity. An adaptive comfort approach facilitates in-between spaces as environmental buffers to mediate different micro-climatic zones. Thus, the design encourages a flexible domestic lifestyle where residents have access to live-work spaces accompanied by different temperature zones and convertible in their programmatic use.
From the urban scale, the Midtown theme of the project is addressed by incorporating creative studios and offices on the ground level, where pocket spaces between the villas are utilized as outdoor working areas. These “urban rooms” dissolve the boundary between interior and exterior and reinforce the local working yard culture, once again calibrating doors and rooms to form an inhabitable and sharable passage.
Harvard GSD 2021, Option Studio
Advised by Christopher C.M. Lee
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