Houses · The Brahmasthan House · v4
v4 — superseded
Right about the structure. Wrong about the organisation. And it walled in the room the whole house was built around.
This page is a record, not a proposal. The current version is v5, and everything below was replaced by it. It is kept because a correction is only legible beside the thing it corrected — the same reason the Body House's own record shows the drawing that was wrong next to the one that fixed it, and the reason nothing on this page has been quietly improved to agree with what came after.
Nine rooms on eight levels, 60.4 m² of declared room on a 92.6 m² footprint, round a court of 4.16 by 3.64 metres. M = 520, riser M/3, going M/2 — the modulus and the construction here are v5's, because they were the parts that worked.
The model, as it was
The 3D needs JavaScript, WebGL and a connection. The ledger of levels beside it needs none of the three, and the record below is on this page already.
Look inside
| ±0.0000 | the brahmasthan — and the drum around it runs unbroken from here to +8.840 |
|---|---|
| +0.5203 risers · 1 M | kitchen and entry, on the plinth line — inside and outside are one level here |
| +1.0406 · 2 M | eating alcove, three risers off the kitchen, 2.08 clear under the shared soffit |
| +3.64021 · 7 M | day room and terrace, one level — the head of the great flight |
| +4.68027 · 9 M | work shelf, six risers up and across the void from the day room |
| +5.72033 · 11 M | the sleeping ring — at the top, on the buried north side |
| +8.84051 · 17 M | head of the spine; the cone springs six risers above it |
Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom. Download it as OBJ or GLB from the corner of the frame.
What it got right, and still holds
v3 had been made model-first, and its rooms hung off a screen wall that could not have carried them. v4 was re-derived in the right order, and three decisions out of that re-derivation survived into v5 unchanged.
Two tubes rather than one wall. The void wall became a spine — a perforated stone drum, 520 thick, carrying every platform and the whole roof — and the outer wall became skin, 390 thick, carrying nothing. Once the skin carries nothing it is free to be opened, blinded or veiled as each room needs, and the exterior stops being a composition and becomes a result. Radial timber joists, 240 by 63 at 400 centres, span tube to tube. No platform is cantilevered anywhere in the house.
The modulus, arrived at from the stair. Riser M/3 = 173.3 on a going of M/2 = 260, so three risers make exactly one modulus of 520. Every level is therefore a whole number of risers and a whole number of M, and a change of room can be one step, three steps or six without any of them being an odd number. That 520 is the village plinth and the Body House modulus, reached here from the other end.
Seismic bands as architecture. Four continuous timber bands at 1 M, 2 M, 7 M and 14 M, doing the work a ring beam does in a building that expects to be shaken, and readable on the elevation as the lines they are rather than hidden in the wall.
All three are in v5 without amendment. The parts that changed are above them.
What it got wrong
It walled in the brahmasthan. This is the one that matters and it took four versions to see. Every room above the ground met the void with a solid masonry upstand, and the drum between the piers ran unbroken from the paving to the head of the spine at +8.840. So the middle of the plan was correctly left out and then immediately shut off: a shaft you glanced into on your way past, rather than a room anything was in. Switch on Section above and swing the cut — there is no opening in that drum at any level. In v5 the drum stops at every floor and each room stands at the brink behind a 520 bench sill and balusters at 173 centres.
It put the beds at the top and the cooking at the bottom. The sleeping ring sat at +5.720, on the buried north side, and the kitchen and entry at +0.520. That is upside down for this house. Sleeping wants the cool, dark, earth-backed bottom of the section and the light it does get can come across the court; work wants the top, where the north light is even all day. v5 inverts the whole stack, and once inverted the bedrooms can afford to be blind to the outside altogether.
It leaned too far in. The day room leaned two moduli out over the court and the other rooms one, which funnelled the void from 14.0 m² at the paving down to about 5.4 m² at the top — a chimney rather than a shared room. v5 halves the lean, and the void widens as it rises instead.
60.4 m² of declared room on a 92.6 m² footprint. Nine named spaces, none of them large: the day room is 13.7 m², the work shelf 8.1. v5 reaches 148.3 m² net on 94.9 — almost the same ground, two and a half times the room — because it stacks five inhabited levels round the court instead of scattering eight part-levels through it.
What it kept: the curve pays for itself either way. The outer perimeter is 34.51 m where a rectangle of the same area would need 38.50 — 10.4% less wall to build, insulate and maintain.