CASE STUDY
ARCHI-TECTONICS’ LONDON SOLAR HOUSE DELIVERS COMPACT RICHNESS AS A PROTOTYPE FOR HIGH-DENSITY URBAN LIVING
Archi-Tectonics expanded a century-old brick townhouse in the heart of London into a modern home that is double its original size for a family of four. The New York design firm turned the unique historic character of the existing 2-story solid masonry structure, as well as its compact neighborhood setting, into a design opportunity.
The 2,250 square-feet London Solar House is designed with the notion that‘ small is beautiful’, something that can be traced back to the early modernists of Europe and America who used this as a premise in their search for the most ergonomic and frugal housing unit. While their solutions leaned towards what is just enough to live comfortably, Archi-Tectonics have maximized richness and complexity to create a 4-dimensional interplay of spaces linked across two eras in time and intricately crafted with shifts in movement, perspective, and materiality. The house’ s manifold attachments to the adjacent structures and surrounding vegetation served as the guide to the proposed volumetric extrusions that establish an otherness within the existing context.
The original structure is left intact to maintain the largely opaque building edges and serve as the foundational base for the new intervention. It is treated as the structural core, off of which a multifaceted roof extension enveloping an additional story and other hovering projections emerges. The intersection between the folded zinc-and-glass envelope and the densely packed program within generates several distinctly-formed apertures
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