SLAUGHTERHOUSE Fall 2023
Beginning with the “Box/Casa House” typology as a site for mutation and experimentation, “Slaughterhouse” presents a two-part series of architectural and spatial transformation. Questions of domesticity, materiality, and transfiguration became the basis of an exploration into the alienation of a potential domestic architecture.
The project began with the proverbial box house, a pervasive typology with a particular aesthetic and phenomenological expression. Situated in Patagonia, Argentina, typical contextual factors were backgrounded in favor of an introverted and contained experience.
Part one of the series presents the box house as a site for intervention. However, the prerogative was to not touch the existing house, only the half that was chosen to remove.
Part two introduced the same constraints, however the ‘other half’ was consequence of a random redistribution of other studio projects. Testing the established language from part one with someone else’s project was the driver for the mutation of the mutation.
The main expression of the mutation was literally derived from the tradition of Argentinian butchery. As an important cultural practice, butchery presented an interesting way to develop a new type of domestic environment. Techniques, textures, and formal languages from the various types of meats and cuts inspired a different kind of architecture; one that is not necessarily living or dead, but one that is spawned from the very material that constitutes the way we live.
Connective Tissue
The original box house is the Mills Toy Management house, with its integrated floor-boxes serving as extra storage spaces for children’s’ toys. These boxes were seemingly consumed, but never digested, by house addition and become moments of residual orthodoxy that enrich the new domestic space. At the point of connection, the volumes clash, with the new meaty exterior abutting the kitchen and glass wall. This moment is intentionally messy and abrupt as if it is a snapshot of this new reality growing into the existing.
Domesticity
When viewed from the interior, the project becomes clearly a negotiation between the existing material and architectural infrastructure from the box house and the imposition of meat/flesh. In certain areas, the fleshy areas become foregrounded, as the interface between occupant and architecture changes. Tertiary systems are mediated through the dissolution of various layers of material, as if the underlying structure of the drywall is actually meat.
Estranging Convention
Another prerogative of the project was to replace the missing program of the now-half box house. In the Mills precedent home, one of the main features of the domestic space is a bathroom. In redefining this original conceptual aim, an outhouse became a cheeky realization of this ‘renovation’.
In the project, the outhouse becomes an estranged version of itself, with proportions and a stance that is slightly off. Also, the primitive shape language from the main house bleeds into it, furthering the motif of these spheres as void objects imposed by the alien-like meat language.
PART TWO "Greenhouse"
For the second part of the project, another students’ studio project was randomly assigned as an initial condition for the design of another half-house. The project received used flowers as the basis of its geometric investigation. As a stark contrast to the Slaughterhouse, this project used petal-like surfaces to build up large volumes that enveloped the original box house. These surfaces were also intended to communicate a feeling of lightness and ascension from the Patagonian landscape.
When thinking of a way to connect/respond to this language, the transition from a monolithic massing to a disparate, distributed typology was important in developing the meat language as different from, but complimentary to, the flower morphology.
The main change to the meaty interior experience is the implementation of ‘grotto’ as a precedent for the new domestic expression. Periscopes that poke from the ground plane around the flowers allow light to pour into sunken interiors, creating a clear distinction between a flowery surface and pensive, cave-like interior. This new house presents a dual reality, one that soars above and one that recedes below.
AirBnB
Presenting the project as an AirBnB listing heightens its status as a representation of a mutated domestic object. Seen not as an undesirable alien but a unique find makes it more approachable. What if reviews were based on dampness not sleekness? Grunge and not cleanliness? Estrangement and not familiarity?
Rooted Distribution
In placing the main volumes underground, the resulting periscoping forms blend into the expression of the existing project. Even the new greenhouse, a wildly caged glass volume extracted from the previous house iteration, assumes a similar stance to the flower house.
The moments of alienation are generated by the unique architectural elements inherited from the previous design. Elements such as the outhouse, antlers, and spheres begin to allude to what lives below.
The placement of volumes underground around the flower house was driven by opportunities already present in the in the massing. The main access path site at the southern side, with a large arc connecting the main entrance downwards (west) and the main entrance upwards (stair, southeast).
Other periscoping volumes are then aligned with volumes placed in a root-like organization. Traces at the surface enclose the siting of the volumes, with graphic overlays becoming fragments of a forgotten architecture.
Grotto
Below the ground, the interiors are filled with light from the skylights above. One of the main features is the introduction of a more natural interior. The meat material still pervades the expression of these spaces, but the plants and skylights create a different experience in the domestic space.
