The founders of native structure studio Solely If have accomplished a multi-storey, slender home for themselves that’s meant to characterize the potential for “architectural invention in constrained, residual city areas”.
Located in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood, the Slender Home was designed and developed by Adam Snow Frampton and Karolina Czeczek, the husband-and-wife workforce behind New York studio Solely If.
The infill home was constructed on an exceptionally slim parcel that’s 100 ft deep and 13.4 ft large (30 by 4 metres). The width of a typical lot within the space is 25 ft (7.6 metres metres).
The couple acquired the property in 2015 and got down to assemble a house for themselves and their Siberian Husky, Nikita. By creating the challenge on their very own, they aimed to create an experimental type of housing that transcended the standard “client-architect service mannequin”.
The challenge additionally provided the architects an opportunity to supply an instance of the right way to create housing on odd, slender heaps.
“The Slender Home represents a selected architectural proposition, however can be a prototype for infill and a polemic on the better potential for architectural invention in constrained residual city areas,” the architects stated.
The thin website posed a number of challenges. The first concern was bringing in pure gentle and facilitating motion by way of the home.
“On such a constrained website, the principle downside within the design of the Slender Home will not be kind or outward look, however quite daylight and circulation,” the architects stated.
The duo conceived a rectilinear, split-level residence that encompasses 2.5 storeys and a basement. The inside is simply 11 ft large (3.4 metres).
The house’s form, peak and positioning have been largely dictated by native zoning laws. At its highest level, the house rises about 43 ft (13 metres).
Exterior partitions are clad in black stucco. The road-facing elevation options glazed partitions with built-in operable home windows. The same remedy is discovered within the rear, the place the facade overlooks a yard.
A small flight of steps lead as much as the entrance door of the two,815-square-foot (262-square-metre) dwelling.
Areas for lounging, consuming and eating are discovered on the principle ground. Home equipment and storage are integrated into a protracted, cabinetry quantity manufactured from steel, oak and terrazzo. An outsized, glass pivot door extends the dwelling area to the yard.
Up above, the degrees are cut up, quite than stretching the size of the home. This technique supplied “spatial distinctions between completely different home capabilities” and enabled the formation a double-height area on the bottom stage.
The higher flooring maintain a piece examine and two bedrooms, with the examine in a position to be transformed right into a bed room if wanted.
Rooms are arrayed alongside a staircase manufactured from perforated metal, set inside a “vertical void”.
The inside has an absence of conventional partitions and corridors, permitting for deep penetration of daylight and “an uncommon lack of separation”.
“The bedrooms are separated from different areas by way of a plywood quantity, containing loos, closets and pocket doorways for privateness,” the studio defined.
The basement – which is technically a cellar, per native parlance – holds a recreation room, toilet, laundry space, space for storing and mechanical room
Structural partitions are manufactured from strengthened concrete masonry models (CMU). The entrance and rear partitions have diagonal metal braces that present lateral stability.
Flooring encompass steel decking coated in concrete. Poured polyurethane was used as a end.
The Slender Home is a continuation of labor carried out by Solely If for a few years regarding “residual, vacant and irregular heaps all through New York Metropolis”.
The studio has recognized and catalogued 3,600 such heaps within the metropolis, and their findings have been introduced in a 2017 exhibition.
Furthermore, the studio received a world competitors organized by the AIA New York and New York Metropolis’s housing company to develop 23 city-owned vacant, irregular heaps.
Based in 2013, Solely If has accomplished a spread of different tasks in New York, together with a co-working workplace with mirrored surfaces and a white-and-black color palette, and a space-themed underground espresso bar.
The images is by Iwan Baan.
