The Bay Window

domestic imaginaries in San Francisco

with Tatiana Bilbao and Iwan Baan

The starting point for this projects looked at references from around the world of how people had historically adapted their domestic environments to accommodate disease: one thinks of the sleeping porches for the treatment of tuberculosis, or the bed nets that prevent malaria. But we also think of spaces that were designed for the purpose of sickness treatment that became mainstream and embedded into architectural typologies: sun rooms and bay windows.

What is the typology of the house of Healthcare in San Francisco? By exploring a vernacular typology, a bay window, this project speculates around the domestic multiverse that the society of marina bay windows in SFC holds. We are looking at a world of intersecting units that are trying to reach out to each other to form a shared culture of care - key spaces that together aim to nurture the mind and the body: spaces that facilitate both the most needed solitude and privacy and that connect people together.

Mise en scène

The final part of this project envisioned the delivery of a “Box of Knowledge” in the format of a theatre performance in Hastings Hall, Yale School of Architecture. The final model, which had to fit in a predermined frame, sought to represent an ‘insideoutside’ world of intersecting bay windows, each one of them accommodating various programs. The box was animated with a stop-motion projection depicting aspects of the domestic life in this new house typology.

Delight in Degrowth physical rehabilitation facility with Rod Heyes and Prisca Thelman

Dynamic processes that reflect change in matter, time and needs establish the grounds for a recovery of the city, nature and people that is neither linear nor systematic. Healing happens outside a frame, outside parameters but often triggered from within. External stimuli shape behaviours. Instantaneity generates an emotional reaction that can nurture both the brain and the body in relation to what is beautiful, what is unforseen, what appears to be timeless.

Based on a former industrial site on Ford End Road in Bedford, UK, the project envisions a physical rehabilitation centre designed at the scale of a city for healing. Plants, habitats, water and archeology come together to enact a walk of rehabilitation under a great green timber roof. Low and high density, dark and bright spaces provide different degrees of exposure and intimacy. The proposed woodland understorey becomes a dense skin around the light steel structured polycarbonate and timber boxes that host various programs. One chooses their own path and describes their own walk.

I. the landscape revival

In order to develop a nuanced understanding of the Ford End Road site in Bedford and propose an optimistic future for it, a landscape analysis was performed which determined the slow metamorphosis of nature into obvious industrial estates. The landscape strategy thus proposes the subtraction of ground in order to reveal the old industrial foundations of gasholders and traces of former railways existing on site.

The archeological survey led to to the proposal of a new rammed-earth structure in the shape of a network of walkways that would elevate and allow people to walk through the site from 3m above ground.

The masterplan proposes a future scenario for the former industrial site where a BioGas industry would take over in 50 years time. The site would therefore be explored in both its lucrative but also memorial dimensions.

II. a timber object

The second part of the project, a smaller scale intervention, envisions a timber jetty based on the reassemblage of a found 1940s oak chair frame, following the construction principles of the Itsukushima Shinto Shrine on the Island of God. The idea of continuity, distance, monumental but playful character of an object that is trying to commemorate and sit alongside nature was fundamental in the way the edge of the artificial lake was approached and reintroduced into the newly proposed landscape context.

III. a rehabilitation facility

This final part of the project envisions a physical rehabilitation centre to inhabit the North side of the site. It is designed upon the scale of a city for healing - new paths were formed in a labyrinthine arrangement of chamber like buildings that fit in a given perimeter.

Low and high densities, dark and bright spaces provide different degrees of exposure and intimacy and set no boundaries to how much you can experience or heal.

A telegraph pole structure of 4x6x6 was created in order to be flexible enough to provide the birth of an intricate architecture within. The intention was not only to create vertical layers of different heights but also design a depth in the plan with objects that either sit on the edges as arrival or departure points, or towards the inside as more hygenic spaces. The construction envisiones a green roof to contribute to the nurturing of the landscape by creating opportunities for non-human things to emerge. Pools of light were cut from the roof to facilitate the provision of daylight.

The planting strategy for the forest was to respond to the shaded environment under the roof but also to seasonal change.

Lye and Heat water-crematorium

Based in Rainham, London, the project proposes a watercrematorium that aims to both celebrate life and challenge traditional forms of burial and cremation that generally result in enormous carbon releases in the short and long term. Through alkaline hydrolysis, the body is effectively broken down into its chemical components within 6 hours, using only 1/4 of the energy of flame-based cremation. The end result can be either disposed in a sanitary sewer system or used in green spaces.

The lavender garden is aimed to substitue a cemetery, the building thus becoming one with the landscape.

Between Two Walls collective built installation

Located in Queens’ College Cambridge, the installation was built in an alleyway with the purpose of creating more spaces for the students to study. The proposed project consists of a set of six wooden seats suspended on pull-up bars, out of which two were built, including the vertical connection ladders. The existing site and historical buildings suffered no alterations. The design succeded in repurposing the space.