This design is based on the designers’ own home, which is a reworking of a narrow fronted terrace house organised around a central sky-lit space, opening to a garden at the ground floor and a private roof terrace at the top.
The key to opening up the centre of the house to the light while maintaining an efficient plan lies in integrating the circulation with the atrium. The split level section makes use of the nature of the FutureForm volumetric prefabrication system. The house consists of a series of modules stacked on top of a precast concrete lower ground floor. This space accommodates the rainwater storage, the combined heat and power unit or condensing boiler, the underfloor heating controls, the air to air heat exchanger, or any other microgeneration devices which may become available in an easy to access and easy to upgrade set-up. The rest of the lower ground floor could be left unfinished, as is the practice in North America, lowering construction costs and providing a flexible space for whatever needs may arise, such as media room, home office or spare room.
The house as designed has a flat roof, presenting a parapet with a cornice to the street, in the manner of a Georgian townhouse. The flat roof allows for solar thermal and photovoltaic panels to be arrayed at the optimum angle, regardless of the orientation of the building. With the central skylight, this means that the house is independent of solar orientation - it can thus form traditional streets and squares, with the fronts of houses facing each other. Around the back, a generous terrace opens off the living room, which is both a pleasant space and provides solar shading to the triple glazed sliding doors.
The house would be constructed to Passivhaus standards of airtightness and insulation, using recycled cellulose blown into the interstices of the modules. The house will be designed in detail to meet level 5 on the Code for Sustainable Homes. However, as the climate warms, the number of summer days where cooling is needed will increase exponentially. With this in mind, a solar chimney at the centre of the plan is included to extract warm air even if there is no breeze.
The skylight will flood the centre of the house with light, dramatically reducing the need for artificial light. The openness of this space allows for a strong visual connection between the major rooms of the house, from hallway to living room, from dining room to study.
The study space is in the centre of the second floor, enabling parents to discreetly supervise homework and online activities. Across the gap is the dining room, fittingly the most internalised room in the house and a place to focus on friends and family.
The kitchen faces the street, providing surveillance and giving a view to the garden path. A breakfast bar with a big window provides a view of the passing scene.
Hold-open fire doors linked to the alarm, along with the ability to use the roof terrace as a second means of escape, free up the stairs to be open to the house. A sprinkler system using recycled grey water is suggested.
The top of the house is the parents’ space; their bedroom opens onto a roof terrace with a parapet high enough to provide privacy to and from the neighbours but opening up a huge view of the sky, one of the greatest luxuries when living in a city. The designers have shown a Jacuzzi here and with a good supply of hot water from the sun it becomes a more sustainable option.
The bathroom is a pre-installed pod with natural ventilation (this is true too of the family bathroom off of the study space). There is a dressing area and a bay window seat for quiet reading, and space for a computer, or big dressing table, near the door.
The designers could only show one house, and have kept it quite abstract and elegant, once again a Georgian reference, but the nature of the construction means that the street facade can be made of any number of materials. What is important to notice from the townhouses of yesterday is that they are generally made of very few materials - the streetscape is enlivened by the play of symmetries, scales, relief and texture.
An integral garage isn’t within the language of older townhouses. As a townhouse has a narrow frontage it reduces the opportunity for on-street parking, and means that the house needs to be set back quite some distance from the street to provide enough space for a car, if there are two, or if the garage finds use as another room in the house.
It is very important to allow for a generous provision of street trees; in summer they are more important than the buildings, and in winter, their black branches cast beautiful shadows on the facades in the low sun.
The designers have tried to design a house that looks quite simple and is entirely contemporary, and have given some sense of how it the house is organised internally, yet forms pleasant street facades.
Given their narrow frontage and deep plan, their freedom of orientation, these houses can be arranged singly, in pairs, in terraces, in crescents and circles and squares of any shape, as could their predecessors. The architecture is contemporary, without trying to be strident, the urbanism is traditional. That is what a town of townhouses requires. |
