----- The Painting
Vermeer - "Lady Writing A Letter With Her Maid" 1670.
A letter was received, crumpled and thrown onto the floor in anger. Two figures contrast with a grounded and a dynamic pose.
From this I extracted the ideas of tension, opposing forces, counterpoint and balance.
----- The Narrative
"Their bickering came second to civility at the dinner table,
yet the tension still hung in the air."
I chose this narrative as compared to the "[room] for a [person] who [has a hobby]" format because I didn't want to focus on a particular program for this project - it appealed more to me to create a space that was influenced by an emotion rather than a niche activity.
I feel this narrative also suggests, rather than dictates, who or what the space is for. It suggests a domestic environment (in this case, a couple) while providing a base emotion from which to build.
----- The Rooms
1) Dining Room: The grounding element.
I perceived the dining room to be an environment where a couple would be required to remain civil despite any previous opposition of views - a still and almost sterile environment with regulated diffuse light. I chose to create this atmosphere by avoiding openings with direct sunlight, and the reflection of light off a soda washed concrete ceiling, much like that of Louis Kahn's Kimbell Museum (and also the underside of the platform steps of the Opera House). The lack of 'true' windows also controls the environment, allowing it to become highly insular, and contributing to the feeling of stillness and focussing (or confining) the attention of the client to the room and the contents within it - in this case, their partner across the table.
The tension is pulled through the room with the overhead beam, and additionally, other planar elements such as the side benches and the long table with its seats on opposing ends of the table arranged in bi-axial symmetry. The use of a solid beam (compared to the translucent one by Kahn) was to juxtapose the light and dark. My inspiration for this came from Tadao Ando's Azuma House. I also tried to emphasise the converging lines of perspective (and thus the focal point of the view) by a 5 degree taper towards one end of the room.
2) Study: The dynamic element.
This room related to the writing of the letter - the anger and possibly the source of the tension. To oppose the grounded nature of the dining room, the study was perceived as being greatly separated from the values of its counterpoint and thus required a degree of detachment.
This idea of separation was spatially influenced by Durbach Block's Holman House (with it's sea-view room on stilts peering over a cliff) and Denton Corker Marshall's Wilson House (which cantilevers to a vast view of a valley), as I felt that both provided an example of a room turning its back on the rest of the house.
I aimed to create a dynamic form by cantilevering part of the study, as if pulling against and implying that without the grounding of the dining room that this would fall off the cliff. Its irregular quadrilatral form also tries to pull away from the dining room in both plan (as it is stretched and bent around a turning point between the two buildings) and in elevation (as its upper lip tries to reach further into the void over the cliff).
Yet the section reveals a tightening of vertical space as you move towards the most extreme end of the room, like a tension increasing as you move further from the grounding element.
The window in this room is placed before a group walls which are arranged to imply another room outside of this window. The first purpose of this is to create a dark, framing shadow which will contrast to the light-drenched landscape, distancing you from the outside world and the reality of the landscape. The second is to control the angle of view to the outside world, mimicking the angered mindset of not being able to 'see around corners' or 'see the whole picture'.
3) The link between the two
The study is physically detached from the dining room, yet the two are still linked by the theme of tension. The beam which runs through the dining room extends to the outdoors as a shading device, changing direction as if bent around a central pillar. This is echoed in the steps below it, with the point of directional change occurring slightly out of sync to that of the shading device to represent an addition of torsion within the tension. The shading device then attaches to the study, and ultimately dictates the tightening of the ceiling height within.
Both rooms are highly insular, pulling against each other. It is this point of directional change that escapes the confines of the walls of building however, that very subtly suggests an easily overlooked point of balance between the two opposing forces.
