The work · houses
Three houses
Same method, different starting conditions,
and they disagree with each other.
Both were got at the way the design language says: carved from the inside, organised the way a body is organised, the whole of it available at once, and not stopping at the walls. None has been restyled to agree with the others, because the method is not a style and three honest answers to three different questions have no obligation to look related.
One is a single volume under one ridge that argues with the weather — a wall of glass to the south and a brow calculated to the millimetre so the glass takes December sun and refuses June. One turns its back on the weather and organises itself around a hole in the middle of its own plan. And one is small enough to stand on a terrace beside the other two, with a single lit room at the bottom of it and every other floor looking down into that.
02
The Body House
A house at 2,300 m in the Nepali high mid-hills. 113 m² on a 70.62 m² curved footprint, every dimension descended from one body measurement — M = 520, the same 520 as the village plinth. Twenty measured sheets, and a sun you can drag through the year.
Read the drawings →03
The Brahmasthan House
No storeys — five inhabited levels, all of them a whole number of 173 mm risers above the paving, wound round an open centre 4.16 by 3.64 m with a tree, a basin and a firebox in it. Sleeping at the bottom with no window to the outside; work alone on top. Forty-two risers and one turn between them. Seven sheets plotted from the model’s own file, and a model you can cut open and pull apart.
Climb it →04
The Tiny House
5850 square over the walls, and 30.3 m² of floor got out of 27.6 m² of ground because the floor is at seven heights. One room has light — the tall centre, at the bottom — and the climb spirals up and away from it, so every other plateau is a gallery over the one lit room. Seventeen cubic metres of storage, none of it overhead.
Look down into it →What they disagree about
Not the modulus, any more. The Body House descends from M = 520, the height a person sits down on without deciding to, and it is the same 520 as the village plinth. The Brahmasthan House reached the same 520 from the other end — three risers of 173.3, arrived at by climbing rather than by measuring a body. Two independent derivations landing on one number is the strongest thing either project has to say for it, and neither was adjusted to meet the other.
Where the light comes from, and what the middle is for. The Body House takes light through one south wall and spends twenty sheets making sure that wall behaves. The Brahmasthan House leaves the middle of its plan out and lights three bedrooms across it, off nothing else at all. Every room above those bedrooms stands at the open brink of that void behind a bench sill rather than behind a wall, which is what makes the left-out room the one they share.
The Tiny House does a third thing, and it is the one that reverses the usual arrangement. Its lit room is the lowest floor rather than the top of a stair, so the climb goes up and away from the light and every plateau looks down into it. Five of its seven rooms have no window at all. It arrives at the same answer as the other two by a different route: what a house shares is the volume you can see the whole of from anywhere in it.
What they cost. The Body House is a buildable set drawn so that someone who is not us can build it. The other two are spatial studies with no structure sized and no site surveyed, and each carries one gap it names on its own page: for the Brahmasthan House the sky from a bedroom’s court window is a 2.8° slot on a well index of 2.86 — dark enough to sleep in and too dark for anything else; for the Tiny House it is a bathroom standing 4500 with no daylight and no openable vent, on a single ventilation path up through the middle of the house.
What is common to all three, and is not negotiable in any of them: the section is the primary drawing, the exterior is a result, and the test is whether a person uses it without deciding to.
How the first one was got wrong first →