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Sumit Singhal
Sumit Singhal loves modern architecture. He comes from a family of builders who have built more than 20 projects in the last ten years near Delhi in India. He has recently started writing about the architectural projects that catch his imagination. Hendee-Borg House in Sonoma, California by William O’Brien Jr.February 28th, 2014 by Sumit Singhal
Article source: William O’Brien Jr. The Hendee-Borg House is a symmetrical saw-tooth roof house for two artists—a sculptor and a media artist—that includes a pair of large artist studios and an attenuated gallery space, in addition to a sequence of domestic spaces. The studio spaces are planometrically-mirrored about an east-west axis in order to facilitate distinct, natural lighting conditions for each studio under a series of eight skylights.  Image Courtesy © William O’Brien Jr.
 Image Courtesy © William O’Brien Jr. This arrangement provides diffuse, northern light in the south-facing studio, and bands of direct light in the north-facing studio. Although the studio spaces remain connected both spatially and by way of a shared gallery wall, the main living and dining area separate them. The primary order of symmetry, as is evidenced from the exterior by the profile of the roofline, is challenged on the interior by particular motivations related to the domestic program.  Image Courtesy © William O’Brien Jr. These motivations—the desire for natural light from a skylight in the opposing direction to the series of large skylights, for example—foster several, local secondary orders of symmetry. Due to volumetric requirements of stairs in conventionally scaled houses, stairs typically resist planometric symmetry (stairs of grandiosity are an exception). In turn, the circulation throughout the house and studio spaces is circuitous. It is an asymmetrical, indirect and continuous loop that encounters two sets of half-stairs, both studios, the connecting gallery, and the stair on the domestic side of the house.  Image Courtesy © William O’Brien Jr. William O’Brien Jr. is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and is principal of an independent design practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also one of the founding members of Collective–LOK.  Image Courtesy © William O’Brien Jr. In 2013 Architectural Record awarded him with the Design Vanguard Award, a prize given to ten firms internationally. Also this year, Wallpaper* named him one of the top twenty emerging architects in the world, and included him in the 2013 Architects Directory.He is the recipient of the 2012-2013 Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture awarded by the American Academy in Rome. His practice was awarded the 2011 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers. In 2010 his practice was a finalist for the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program and was recognized as a winner of the Design Biennial Boston Award.  Image Courtesy © William O’Brien Jr. O’Brien has taught previously at The University of California Berkeley as a Bernard Maybeck Fellow and was the LeFevre Emerging Practitioner Fellow at The Ohio State University. Before joining MIT, for two years he was Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, where he taught advanced theory seminars and design studios in the graduate curriculum. At MIT O’Brien currently holds the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Chair and teaches design studios in both the graduate and undergraduate programs. He was the recipient of the 2010 Rotch Traveling Studio Scholarship which funded research and travel for an advanced design studio in Iceland.  Image Courtesy © William O’Brien Jr. O’Brien pursued his graduate studies at Harvard University where he was the recipient of the Master of Architecture Faculty Design Award. Prior to graduate school he attended Hobart College in New York where he studied architecture and music theory and was the winner of the Nicholas Cusimano Prize in Music. After completion of his graduate work he studied in Austria as the recipient of the Hayward Prize for Fine Arts Traveling Fellowship in Architecture under the sponsorship of The American Austrian Foundation. He has been named a MacDowell Fellow by the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and a Socrates Fellow by the Aspen Institute.  Image Courtesy © William O’Brien Jr. His publications include essays, “Approaching Irreducible Formations” in ACADIA re:Form, and “Totems” and “Experts in Expediency” in Log Journal. He is currently contributing to and editing a collection of essays for which he has received a grant from The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.  Image Courtesy © William O’Brien Jr.  Image Courtesy © William O’Brien Jr.  Image Courtesy © William O’Brien Jr.  Image Courtesy © William O’Brien Jr.
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Tags: California, Sonoma Category: House |
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