use Chicago common brick as a prosaic
building material confined to out-of-sight
areas. Instead it takes centre stage in his
design, both from the street and within the
house itself.
“I wanted to take something people
usually viewed as garbage and turn it into
gold,” he says.
“Brick walls wrap the site, and the
L-shaped house. Think of it like a jewel
box, with the house like a jewel sitting
within a brick box.”
What particularly lifts Scarpa’s use of
this brick out of the ordinary is his treat-
ment of the front facade, which consists
of a series of twisting brick columns. It’s
a design that he knew would potentially
appear extremely complex to the masons
undertaking the build.
“So we computer generated the posi-
tion of every single brick used on the
house to show how the system worked,
and that it really wasn’t going to be that
expensive to do,” he says.
But Scarpa’s motive for incorporating
the twisting columns wasn’t just to solve a
Facing page: Behind the twisting brick facade, a
courtyard is cradled in the arms of the L-shaped
home. The ground floor is fully transparent, with
views through the living area to the back of the
property.
Above and following pages: Outside in – the brick
side wall runs the length of the property, including
through the home’s interior. Left-over brick and
spoil from construction were hammered to form a
gravel used to line the courtyard.
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