SM

San Francisco, CA   900ft2 

SixFoot20 specializes in fusing street foods from different cultures. Currently operating from a utility tricycle equipped with a hot plate and ice box, the laundromat at 439 Duboce Avenue in San Francisco will be SixFoot20’s first bricks-and-mortar location. 

We wish to bring the street into the restaurant and architecturally express the hybridized nature of the menu through materials and layers. As much as is allowable by San Francisco’s historic overlay restrictions, we will open the facade. Sometime in the past 25 years, the laundromat’s classic recessed vitrine storefront was replaced with fixed plexiglass panels. We will maintain the same proportions but replace the vitrine with vertical bifold windows. Benches in front of the windows will double as steps, patrons do not have to enter through the door, they can climb through the window onto a continuous linear “stoop” that wraps in front of the service counter. The stoop will replace conventional seating.

SixFoot20’s menu not only hybridizes cultures - east and west, north and south - it challenges notions of slow and fast food. Menus are created daily based on the availability of ingredients. Items are cooked to order, and served in paper. Spatially the restaurant will blend expectations of fast and slow, it will feel provisional, but also encourage a desire to linger. 

With no budget for expensive materials, we will be repurposing the remains of the laundromat. Broken washers and dryers will be parted out for paneling formwork, and we are currently figuring out how to convert a clothes dryer into a coffee roaster…

Litchfield, ME.     800ft2

In the 1920s, the small towns in an inland lake district in central Maine began dividing parcels of land into small "camps" to attract distant urbanites to invest in inexpensive vacation homes. Aggregations of camps were known as "colonies". At Pleasant Pond land use restrictions were minimal; many camps were built on or over the water, raised up on stilts. Many were built close together, with no setback requirements. 

The property on Pleasant Pond Lane includes a camp dating from the original colony. The property has been in the same family for 75 years, its narrow boomerang shape is almost unbuildable by today's zoning restrictions. The family  desires a small, winterized, self-sufficient house, in contrast to the uninsulated summer-use-only camp on the property's waterfront.  

The proposed house is situated at the highpoint of the site to maximize views and allow the roof solar array to sit above the surrounding forest. The 800 square foot house coincidentally mirrors the site's boomerang shape, to maximize the efficiency of the solar panels year-round and create a gently enclosed private zone on the south exposure. The northern facades will be partially under grade where the hill peaks out, this minimizes the vis-a-vis with a  neighboring house and improves envelope efficiency to make up for the home's less-than thermally ideal long, narrow shape. On the interior, the opposing ends will contain adult and children's bedrooms, with living space in the middle, centered on a wood burning stove.



The first phase of the project includes a redesign of the kitchen in the existing camp. The tiny kitchen has two walls that separate it from the larger living areas. These function as sheer walls. The design maintains the structural function of these walls much as a honeycomb has structure,  by converting them to built-in storage "boxes", while opening them up to the space beyond. 

Washington DC.      1,700ft2

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