The plan is composed of five rooms of equal size and proportion arranged in interlocking loops around two room cores, containing the dwelling’s wet areas. These otherwise identical rooms are differentiated by their adjacencies and openings to the cores, to each other, and out to the garden. At the plan’s centre, two rooms open onto each other and to the semi-enclosed kitchen, providing a moment of relief from the directionality of the looped plan. These rooms provide the amenity and connection of the typical open-plan living, dining, and kitchen, while retaining the integrity of each room. The plan responds to the suburban tripartite front of garage, entry, and main bedroom, adapting the garage as an open carport adjoining the house proper, with the entry signified by a verandah portico. The carport and house both adopt skillion roofs, sharing a single implied ridgeline in the void over the portico. This void enables a simultaneous reading of a unified primary facade in the form of a broken pediment, and the lower skillion roof form as an annex separate to the house proper.
Looped Rooms and Yards
The dwellings are arranged on their plots such that they share a front alignment, repeating the broken pediment of the street facade in groups of three throughout the landscape. This repetition generates small common plazas, or shared front yards between grouped dwellings, with the carport providing a buffer to the more private backyard. The front portico frames a passage through to this private backyard, where its structure takes the form of a side pergola. Centred above this pergola, the larger of the two skillion roofs presents a second ridgeline, echoing the pediment form of the front facade while reducing the dwelling’s mass into the back garden. The spacing of the portico columns mediates a relationship between plan and facade, establishing a 3 meter spacing against the pinwheeled internal order of the plan. This column spacing frames the openings into the plan, grouping both the front and side pergola doors with an adjacent window, signifying two moments of entry for the dwelling’s two fronts. A duplex reading is thereby offered, establishing a dual occupancy in the two loops, connected through the shared middle.