Ford House

The three bedroom house is located in Charlottesville, Virginia in a residential area near the courthouse. The plot, just under a quarter acre, is an urban leftover, an eccentric combination of fragments of subdivided lots, traversed by both sanitary and open storm sewers, created by combining lots and relocating sewers. The result of the combined zoning setbacks and utility easements is a buildable area in which the house literally cannot move an inch. The house is outside the Charlottesville Historic District and is legally subject only to zoning and building code regulations.

This is a house about decisions that were not made, not because I am indecisive, which I am, but because many of those decisions that architects consider to be critical choices in design are to me either unnecessary or impossible- the choice between the detail of traditional architecture and the non-detail of minimalism, between a frame building and a wall building, between a free plan and a cellular plan, between a tight fit and a loose fit with function. These were all decisions in which I chose not one alternative but both. I did not believe the conventional wisdom that to be modern was to be minimal, scaleless, generalized and reductive or that to be representational, to make references to history, or to be responsive to scale was to be traditional.

The first choice, or rather non-choice, was structure. I have always felt, as did Louis Kahn, that the choice of a structural system was also the choice of a system of spatial order, not out of necessity but out of the nature of the discipline of architecture, and thus that to be spatially adventurous one had to be structurally adventurous. A critical choice was thus the form and material of framing. Should the house be steel or wood? If wood should it be platform or heavy timber framing? This was the first of the decisions not made. Many of the all-wood houses I admire are, in fact, nothing of the sort. The “wood” houses of Wright contain a fair amount of steel, carefully kept out of sight. He was not alone- Richardson, White, Stickley, and the Greene brothers all designed buildings that, while meticulous in their expression of wood, contain not a little steel at some critical locations. The Modernist steel house is no less impure. The Eames house and the ‘steel’ Case Study Houses are so in image only, using steel only for exposed structure; the remainder of the framing, typically wood joists and studs, is hidden from view, invariably built of rough carpentry to reduce cost and facilitate construction. Rather than doing either a steel house or a wood house, I did both. It seemed to me that it was the choice of an image rather than the choice of a technique, that it was not a real one; a concept that presented a kind of false polarity, and even if possible was not desirable, given the rich juxtaposition of different scales and thus different types of space that could occur by juxtaposing the two materials.

Another choice not made was between generality and specificity, between an architecture that could bet described as “fitting like an old shoe”- the type of architecture that Aalto and Kahn aspired to- and the more generic free plan, loft space that characterizes much of Modernism. Again, while I admired both types, neither seemed satisfactory or possible to achieve in pure form. The universal nature of much modern space is the source of much of its irrelevance- the detachment of buildings from the activities that they house. It is an attribute that characterizes some of the worst of Modern Architecture, yet some of the finest modern houses have this quality- the Farnsworth house or the Case Study houses. At the same time much of the ‘specific’ architecture that characterizes the work of Kahn or Aalto is so over-designed as to be highly inflexible. Again I decided to do neither and both.

Site Plan The site is in the city of Charlottesville, about four blocks north a House of the main street and county court house. Although there b Parking are large nineteenth century houses and larger institutional c Stream buildings in the area, the immediate context is small houses d Gabion retaining wall of the 1950s. The site is crossed in both directions by sanitary e Sewer easement and zoning setback and storm sewers which require easements and this, combined f Property line with zoning restrictions, precisely define a L shaped building footprint at the eastern extremity of the property.

First Floor Plan South at top El +0’-0”

1 Breakfast Room a 2 Kitchen b 3 Dining Room c 4 Guest Bedroom d 5 Guest Bath 6 Lower Living Room

Entry Dining table Built in seating(future) Setback/ easement line

Since the parcel is almost twice as long as it is deep, the views within the site, such as they are, are toward the west along its long axis. The entry is on an axis with the fireplace (above) and the dining table (below) running north-south along the short dimension of the site. A second axis, defined primarily by the stair, runs east/west.

These two axes align roughly with the two existing streams.

Second Floor Plan South at top El +8’-6”

1 Lower living room 2 Living room 3 Master bedroom 4 Master bath

North Elevation

Within the uniform grid of the post and beam structure are a number of compositional centers defining views, circulation, and creating patterns of symmetry in plan and section.

These are buildings within buildings, creating their own structural frames, obeying their own rules of composition, creating their own individual spaces, and having their own relationship to the exterior.

Third Floor Plan Section looking south South at top El +17’-0”

1 Study 1 Dining Room 2 Library 2 Guest bedroom 3 Bedroom 3 Living Room 4 Bath 4 Library 5 Study a Open to below

b

Bookcases

The size of the program in relation to the buildable area of the site required a structure that was three stories, and the second level living area is less the product of the architectural tradition of the piano nobile than of programmatic necessity as dining, kitchen and guest bedroom occupy most of the ground floor, forcing the main living space up to the second floor. One third of the living room is lowered a half level to connect to the kitchen and dining area below.

Section looking North 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Breakfast room Kitchen Lower Living room Bath Bedroom Living room Library Study

South Elevation

It was apparent from the beginning that books would occupy a large part of the house. A separate library would become little more than a storeroom, and a primary impulse was to make the book space and the living space one. The quality I most admire in the libraries of Asplund and Aalto, is the way the books become the architecture. This was to become the major structural challenge, and in some ways the major structural choice in determining the form.

Section looking East 1 2 3

Breakfast Room/ Kitchen Master bedroom Bedroom

East Elevation

The narrow wing of the house, containing bedrooms and kitchen, is a wood frame structure of glu-lam beams and tongue and groove decking.

Windows in the bedrooms and on the south/ street side are high narrow slits in the depth of the wall. Major glazed areas are on the north/ garden side to connect kitchen and dining to the yard.

While the primary axis runs from the entry toward the fireplace, a second axis, defined primarily by the stair, runs east-west from the small living room towards the bedrooms, kitchen, and breakfast rooms. Thus when moving north-south one is directed towards the fireplaces; moving east-west one is directed toward the exterior. Both axes end in dining areas, transitional spaces situated on the western perimeter and here the building skin is broken in to connect exterior and interior. One third the living area is lowered to connect the main living floor with the kitchen and dining on the first floor.

Structure The house is built of two types of structure and thus two types of space.

The wood structure is a regular grid of 9’ cubes. This primary structural cage is interrupted, interfered with, displaced, and eroded by the steel structurescolumns, beams, crutches, props, and oversized furniture- to accomplish a functional task, to create a disconnection, to reconcile a contradiction.

The largest steel structure supports the library and roof. It carries the heaviest load, sustains the longest span, and is completely triangulated, at least in one plane. The two Vs support the major beams of the library; the two Ws support the butterfly roof.

While the wood system grows up out of the ground and is composed of elements of constant dimension, the steel structure is lightweight, sits lightly on the ground and is built of members of variable size designed to meet specific loads, giving it the quality of oversized furniture.

The smaller of the steel structures are the built-in furniture elements. Each built-in furniture piece is enlarged and expanded, replacing columns and beams, supporting walls and windows, transforming the wood building skin when they touch, until the frame of the furniture becomes the structure of the space that houses it.

The general structure is wood, post and beam, square in plan, square in section, based on the maximum span of the materials and generates a generic loft space. The specific structures are steel, non-rectilinear, sized to fit the job at hand, and fitted to their function that respond in detail to individual programmatic conditions.

While the wood system grows up out of the ground and is composed of elements of constant dimension, the steel structure is lightweight, sits lightly on the ground and is built of members of variable size designed to meet specific loads, giving it the quality of oversized furniture.

The various structural systems employ three types of joints.

The joints of the large steel structure is generally made with plates, slicing the end of the round structural tubes and preserving the visual discontinuity while achieving structural continuity. The small furniture elements have continuous joints formed by welding the pipes and angles in ways that imply connection where there is usually a joint, following the linear structures associated with tubular metal furniture.

The wood to wood joints of the post and lintel system are made with metal using a ‘bucket and bolt system.’ They are less articulated than the large steel joints but at the same time highly descriptive of connection. In the finished construction the beams are exposed; the columns are concealed. The glass at the bedroom windows, the most private areas, is pulled deep inside the wall. Service spaces- closets, bathrooms, mechanical rooms- are objects that float within the loft space, touching neither the walls not the roof or floor deck above. Sliding doors and in the bathroom, a sliding mirror, provide functional separation.

The fenestration systems reflect the different orders of structural and spatial systems. At the most transparent spaces- the entry bay and the dining room- the glass is pushed forward to the face of the adjacent wood wall (See previous page) At the most private spaces- the bedrooms- it is pulled back as far as possible. At the in-between spaces such as the inglenooks, the wall is recessed to meet the plane of the glass, a modification made possible by the structural support provided to the wall by the oversized furniture. At the most private areas- the bedrooms- the glass is the most recessed.

The dining areas are points of maximum transparency and connection to the exterior and here the glass is pushed forward to the face of the wall flush with the steel column. The steel to wood joints are made in similar fashion to the wood to wood joints.

The house has a number of classical overtones. It is, after all a double cube with a piano nobile and a number of axes of symmetry (none in the center of the building) but it is not particularly Jeffersonian in any way but the very general, and owes more to Asplund, Neutra, Stanford White, and Richard Norman Shaw than to Mills, Latrobe, or Jefferson