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Washington DC.   1800ft2 

Best Foot Backward -

As a building typology, the townhouse suffers from front-back schizophrenia. Some have a street-centric presence, front porches and stoops that encourage hanging about. Others are socially awkward up front but have interesting interior lives, and, ideally, private space in the back that makes up for the inability to relate up front. 

These differences reflect the social prerogatives of the time they were built. Our townhouse project in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington DC is a perfect example of the introverted townhouse. It was built in 1978, in the midst of the Carter Administration, when Washington DC was the murder capital of the nation and the city was in the final throes of post-war white-flight. 

Our townhouse was built in a moment of optimism, part of a program to provide new housing stock in neighborhoods where the people who could afford new homes were looking for them in leafy suburbs. It was a townhouse built to compete with the cul-de-sac rambler. Despite its central urban location, its first priority was the car. It’s second priority was security, and its third priority was, well, a sunken living room. 

With its one car garage dominating the front facade, and predicable, derivatively historicist fenestration, the townhouse has an uninviting street presence. On the first floor, a dark, narrow kitchen divided the sunken living room from a quasi-formal dining area; on the second floor tiny bathrooms were hemmed in by unnecessarily large circulation space. Everywhere, residual Victorian notions of the division of space based on divisions of gender and labor were fighting hard with 1970s Free To Be You and Me. 

Yanking this property into a more contemporary mode took several steps. Our first was to blow the kitchen open. Walls on the ground floor needed to do more than just divide things. We used millwork storage blocks to delineate spaces and create continuity from front to back. 

Dummerston, VT     2600ft2

At some point in history most of us have ancestors that lived in Longhouses.The Longhouse is an architectural typology that spans geography, epochs, and cultures. Ancient and universal. From the rumah betang of Indonesia, the badaghar of Nepal, to the Viking langhus of Scandinavia and the Kwigw8mna of the Abenaki peoples native to Vermont. The Longhouse form met the social needs of complex cultures, creating communal shelter. Its universality may be why humans seem preternaturally attracted to this form; regardless of where you come from, it has come to mean home. The fact that, in recent years, the term Longhouse has been coopted pejoratively by the alt-right, also means it is ripe for reclamation.

At its simplest it is a rectangular form, enclosing a large space on a single story, with loosely defined ancillary spaces lining the perimeter. Often there is a front and rear entrance and a central hearth. In some cultures the Longhouse was divided bi-laterally, with public spaces on one side and private spaces on the other. 

Among the typologies most common to North America are barns - the largest - and shot-gun houses - the smallest. Our Longhouse is short. Its nod to traditional Longhouses is both formal and programatic. Form-wise it is a simple rectangle topped with high-gables; there is room between the gables for a second floor. Program-wise it serves as intergenerational or communal housing; there is a main autonomous space for sharing, and a secondary autonomous space for elders, friends, visitors; each with its own clusters of public and private space. The central rectangle is pushed and pulled to create spaces that blend interior with exterior: contained porches for passage, lounging, storage.  

Washington DC.      1,700ft2

A redesign of a classic two-story Capital Hill townhouse to optimize function through all stages of a family's evolution. This requires turning the house upside down.

Currently, the townhouse is divided into two separate units on two floors, each with its own HVAC, water and electric meters, and entrances. The client wanted to return the townhouse to a traditional single-family configuration, with a parlor floor downstairs and bedrooms up. We proposed something different. 

Rather than give up the second unit and lose the potential for rental income, we dedicated the back 1/3rd of the first floor to an autonomous efficiency apartment that can also be used as a large bedroom, or a mother-in-law suite, or a temperamental teen-ager hideout, or a  crash pad for a jobless post-college returnee. An accommodation for all potential changes in the life of a family, and perhaps AirBnB.



To do this, the living space is brought to the second floor where there is the potential for loft-style living: open plan, more light, higher ceilings, and more privacy. Downstairs the efficiency gets its own entrance off the alley, and the door between the efficiency and the main space can be readily accessible or sealed, depending on the family's needs at any given time.