The work · 01
The village
A settlement is mostly a set of distances,
and the distances are the design.
A small house designed backwards from one whole day — waking, cooking, working, receiving someone, being ill, being old in it — and then the piece of land that holds forty of them. Where the water is, how far the neighbour is, and where people are forced to pass each other.
Walk through the models →In the browser
Turn it over before it is built.
Drag to orbit, scroll to come closer. On a phone, two fingers to zoom — and on Android, the cube icon puts the house on the floor in front of you at full size.
The model
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Four metres six by six metres two, on a dry-stone plinth half a metre high. The gable faces the path, because a small building reads as a house from its gable and as a shed from its long side.
Decisions so far
- The plinth is 520 mm. High enough that the timber never stands in wet ground, and exactly the height at which a person sits down on it without deciding to.
- The roof overhangs by 380 mm. Rain leaves the plaster alone, the high summer sun stops at the glass, and the low winter sun comes the whole way into the room.
- The deck is 2.6 m deep. Below about two metres it is a place you pass through. At 2.6 a table and four chairs fit, and the outside becomes the room you use for most of the year.
- The bed is over the kitchen, not beside it. It puts the only low ceiling in the house where you are lying down, and leaves the full four metres of ridge over the part of the room you stand up in.
- The water sits above every roof. It arrives by gravity. There is no pump, so there is nothing to fail on the day it is needed, and the fall from the tank is what the whole site plan is arranged around.
- No house is more than ninety seconds from the tree. The paths cross at the chautari rather than at the entrance, so the walk to a neighbour passes the one place people are already sitting.
What the 520 turned into
The plinth height on this house is an observation: 520 mm is where a person sits down without deciding to. On the next house that number stops being an observation and becomes the modulus — M = 520 — from which every dimension descends. Plinth 1M, the sill-and-seat line 2M, the upper floor 7M, the terrace 12M, the parapet 14M, stair risers M/3 on M/2 treads.
The test that produced it went the same way. No house more than ninety seconds from the tree is the settlement-scale version of one question — does a person use it without deciding to? — and that question is now the first line of the method.
A note on these three models
They are massing studies, generated by tools/build-models.mjs — enough geometry to prove the viewer and hold the page until real exports arrive. They are not drawings and should not be read as any. The Body House is the project that is drawn.