A House on a Suburban Lot

A House on Suburban Lot

Domestication

Think not of suburban neighbours as mere characters or typological character, but as datums, offsets, setback and abutting conditions imposing to tame the site indifferently. Adjacent fences, trees, and roofs defines the sides of a site containing loose, aggregated soil, with a frontal edge bounded by a footpath bisecting the layer of road verge and the site, across a neighbourhood of adjoining lots. The ground elevation changes beyond the frontage, getting subtly lower from the ground level past the entry of the site as a flattened ground of loose soil is enclosed with fences and abutting brickwalls.

As rigid edges are demarcated by a succession of tall, falling fences and rooflines from the neighbouring lots encroaching on the sides, a sense of seclusion and containment is preserved on the site, creating a center of reflected domestication projected from the enclosure. In contrast, a frontal edge is formed with only loosely defined temporary fences set between the footpath and the site, explicitly outlining the site’s legislative borders as a clear yet frangible depiction of containment on the site’s most visited edge.

The verge garden beyond the frontage is kept from assimilating into the site as it is separated by the footpath. Trees of different height splits the frontal edge by inserting itself between the street and the footpath, forming an offset layer of permeable façade.

Domestication is a gradual and considerate outcome, or rather process, of occupying land and preparing the land for inhabitation through gestures of enclosing and covering the areas juxtaposed by, above and within each other, as a collective assemblage to call house, only ultimately confined within its legislative borders.

Preconditioned site within a suburban context forms an area under pre-existing subjection to the intimacy of extended qualities from its immediate and projected neighbours, even prior to domestication acts. The parcel of land are provisioned with an extensively ambiguous garden, a house, and a driveway as an assemblage of equivocal relationships, to garden a house, and to house a garden. In respect to the setbacks that exists in a typical suburban context, the distance between each lot are preserved by the breadth of the untended garden along the edges of the house. Abutting walls are adopted and along with the untamed plants bordering on adjacent neighbouring fences, forms the controversial edge that negotiates as a loose demarcation of a definitive boundary of the site.

The frontal edge however is offset by a front garden of cultivated tall plants as the first layer of enclosure to the front proper beyond the street edge. The varying offset from all of the edges becomes the loosely enveloping garden that ambiguously confines the land which in inversion forms the assemblage of colligated house and garden as the central of domesticity.

House of Gardens

The garden challenges the homogeneity of the suburban context, house in turn becomes the disruption of the garden, overlapping and entangling itself within the assemblage of garden, floors, walls and curtains. Operable windows lines up across the house, its varying accessibility vaguely defines opening, access, and enclosure simultaneously. This can be read as a house of five-ish rooms lined by and between several gardens, or a house with a garden room and garden patio.

Parity

Volumes line up in orderly proportions, varying levels of visibility and accessibility however in equal ratios along the elevations, with operable doors or windows lining the front and sliding doors that doubles as operable walls along the rear, corresponds to the duality of a public frontage and a private rear end.

Domesticationoftopography

The elongated interior space is evenly divided into five smaller spaces, equal-ish in proportion. Sometimes these are clearly rooms lined by corridors, or corridors within rooms lines by verandas. The horizontal roof line is parallel to the elevated floor, contesting the unimpeded and slightly sloped topography of the site, excavated at the rear. ASuburban Lot Site-Longsection

ExtendedDomesticity

The equal offsetted side setbacks from the boundary attempts to circumscribe the width of domestication. Through the continuous coverage of a asymmetrical roof and the curtains as soft enclosure, contrast to the solid masonry wall on the boundary, the offsetted space has been domesticated as an extension of the domesticity. While mostly covered, it is not entirely enclosed. ASuburban Lot Site -

The Garden and the Street

In absence of fence, the front garden inherits the visual continuity of the perimeter fencing, redefining the literacy of domestic edge while enclosing the offset volume of house, mediating frontage from front proper. Behind is not a typological entrance or facade but a veranda around a large room with an ambiguous perimeter and a narrow side corridor.

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EntryMomentPlan

AFormalEntry

A wide driveway divided by walls and fences, an entry framed by the wall, fallen fence, and a slim tree, a hidden entrance to the elevated floor, unperceived from the frontage. Layers of tall grass, curtains and blinds obscures the living space, while vertical members clearly and proportionately divides the frontage in segments, as another attempt to delineate the formal entry. ASuburban Lot EntryMomentElevation

Corridor Doubled as Room

Elevated, setback, offset and only partially enclosed, the veranda is a peculiar space expressed ambiguously as neither a corridor or a room, rather a near room before a room proper. The elevated deck runs through and across the volumes, signifying entry and doubling as an informal living space, less of a thoroughfare and more a long narrow room in itself.

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EntryMomentSection

Enterthroughtheperimeter

Set back loosely to the centre of the site, The steps demarcate the end of the undomesticated area and yet through somewhere between the end of the driveway and side verandah. Formal entrance exist symblically, any opening in the perimeter of the house can be the entrance.

To Fence

A generous setback from its immediate neighbours, a frontal garden carefully tended, and trees lining up the frontage beyond the borders forms an assemblage of disparate yet considerately planned edge that subtly contains the site within. Layer of curtain and blind offset from operable windows modulates visibility. Edge is garden, curtain, blind and windows altogether.

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EdgeMomentPlan

Unremarkable but considered

Typical-ish in its roof pitch and volumetric proportions, the partially enclosed and mostly covered area reads unremarkable and non peculiar. Series of window and doors line its elevation, with the idea of enclosure expressed by the garden and curtain beyond its otherwise ordinary confinement as a box.

RoominaPatiobytheGardens

Facing the generously open frontage with the street and tall trees, is a room in a patio surrounded by the garden, verandah and corridor, and subtly enclosed beneath a layer of tall grass, soft curtain, and adjustable blinds, with the freedom to transform to a patio inclusive of the verandahs, with fully openable window and doors.

Formallyafront,butmorelikeaside

The street facing appers more like side than front, not in its formal language but in its openness and programatic orientation.

NotSidebySide

Garden doesn’t abut veranda but trespasses onto it, which is also the edge of the room. Inside, outside, front and side seem less divisible and instead corridor, room, veranda and garden seem better together than next to one another.

Abigroomwithastrangeoutline

Volume is extended to the edge by domesticating the abutting brick walls. A tended garden is carefully placed within the enclosure of the borrowed walls and the walls from the house, having an ambiguous quality of being at the same time an enclosed but opened garden. Meanwhile a curtain stretches over the rooms, enclosing a disparate set of territories into a loose room of courtyard, veranda, side garden, back garden, toilet, bathroom and bedroom...nearly a detached dwelling or a guest house.

Soft Enclosure

The absence of solid enclosure on the peripheral area is negotiated by an offset untended garden and a series of hanging drapes encircling a span of a few otherwise separable rooms, forming an indefinite entry and enclosure to the space within and without.

RoominaGardenbytheGardens

Garden runs beneath the elevated rooms through the house, juxtaposing itself within and between the placement of rooms, even becoming a room itself, while an overgrown garden at the rear becomes the enclosure of the back yard.

neitheracontainerorjustoutside

Guest room seems at once detached and connected, after all it is under the same roof as its counterpart rooms. As such, while garden reads as a courtyard at first glance, it is little more than a room without a floor between two floored rooms.

Inside,butbarelyinternallyenclosed

Veranda decking meets room flooring without a wall. Room appears like a wide corridor to live in and veranda becomes nothing more than an overly sized corridor narrow decked room due to its interiority