CARROLL COURT AND CALHOUN HOUSE STUDY

Fall 2022 Studio 5, Ink Wash

For this project, we were tasked with designing a house for the family of Charles Carroll, Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. This project was our first residential design. The site of the house is the site of the current Charlcote House in Baltimore, Maryland. It was to be a monumental home and needed to include a chapel and a shrine to the signer.

I went through a lot of iterations in my design process, initially taking inspiration from French Chateau architecture and the Mansarts, as this type of architecture is abundant in Washington, DC, which is in close proximity to the site. I also took inspiration from the Calhoun House by Philip T. Shutze for my garden elevation and employed Shutze’s habit of making two facades that are entirely different from one another, the public façade feeling more imperial and formal and the garden façade being more playful and informal. This drawing block was to include all the same drawings as our precedent house with the addition of a room elevation.

Above: Initial Design Esquisse. My original idea had some more Gothic influences, running with the idea of a French Chateau. Micron pen.

Below: More refined esquisse after removing the Gothic elements.At this point, the design was pretty rudimentary, but all of the main movements were there minus the roof cornice. Micron pen.

Above: Finished North Elevation. This elevation faced the road to the North, making it the more public elevation. Because of this, I designed it in a more formal, imperial, and canonical language.

Above: Finished South Elevation. This elevation was heavily inspired by Shutze’s Calhoun House. It faces the garden and is therefore more private, so it was designed to be more informal and vernacularized than the North façade.