Domestic architecture is capable of engendering one’s sense of belonging to networks of humans and nature, fostering a distinctly personal place for its inhabitants by strengthening their relationship to surrounding people, places, and climates. A relationship on any number of social, emotional, and sensory levels is evident in a gathering of neighbors around a crowded dinner table, a conversation between loved ones in the dappled evening light of a veranda, or a solitary afternoon of reading amongst the pleasant scents of a fragrant garden. In each case, the quality of the connective experience is inseparable from the character of the domestic space in which it occurs; architecture is the moderator between the individual and the collective, between private and public, between the cultivated growth of the exterior and the conserved consistency of the interior.
Prevailing practice in contemporary domestic architecture has shifted architecture’s dynamic capability for moderation towards an unnatural condition of separation. As technological advances enable the more efficient creation and control of an artificial interior environment, they do so at the expense of the relationships that once existed between an inhabitant’s “indoor” and “outdoor” existences.
Once, we varied our daily activities according to the weather and the season; we now take for granted a more narrow, predictable range of tasks around the house. Once, we depended directly upon knowledge of Earth’s soil composition and growth cycles for our sustenance; we now bring food into the home with little understanding about where it came from or how it was made. Sharing and community once played a significant role in our individual abilities to survive; instead domestic architecture now propagates consumption and insularity.
Our project recognizes the need for a re-engagement of the exterior: a reanimation of the sustainable balance between interior and exterior spaces and the diverse activities that can take place across them both.
