THE 4 POINTS OF A NEW HOME

Towards a New Ageless

Competition - Honorable Mention

Team _ Gary Polk, Jungjae Suh

_ Published on Archoutloud
_ Published on Bustler

1. The Home is an actor maintaining agency of various scales.

The Home as an entity is contextualized as part of the family, part of the neighborhood, part of the city, and part of an [ongoing] history. We put effort into the home as we do with numerous other entities, and come to claim ownership on an intimate level; we celebrate living through the rituals of our home as much as we do through the traditions of our family and the cultures of our society. Likewise, the community and other geographical jurisdictions acknowledge the home through various tensions and dialogue to its presence, only rendering it ‘iconic’ through its prevalence, permeance, resonance and endurance.

2. The Home is a cultivation of its politics and environment, but transcends both.

Any typical residence is birthed through the desires and means of its situation, but a Home is as much an evolving product of its filtering occupants as it is a constant reflection of its ongoing political and environmental condition. The Home maintains its privacy, its embarrassment, its pride and its secrets – the façade can be just as much a mask as it can be an honest expression. The true character and culture of the Home does not have to match its public face.

3. The Home endures through the framing of the timely (hi-tech) by that of the timeless (lo-tech).

In tune with technological maturity and infrastructural evolution, the Home allows for the augmentation of needs and desires of its network actors. It endures the pitfalls of aging by providing a skeletal grid for continuous enhancement and renovation through pre-fabricated parcels that update its ‘stages’. These parcels begin to define an era and a lifestyle, but are not engraved to the site, allowing them to be as temporary as the circumstance. This fundamental framework allows for anticipation of obsolete infrastructures, material and climate transformations, technocultural trends and tastes, financial capacities and a fluctuation of need that parallels the inhabitants.

4. The Home is a vessel composed of numerous stages in intertwined play.

In 1947, Richard Neutra famously described in “The Changing House” a space adaptable to fluctuating lifestyles and multiple functions. While the rooms of a home collect our histories and shape our futures, they are just as susceptible to shifting roles. Today, our spaces must be suited for more than the archetypical function; the garage is not just for cars but for band practice; a guestroom may need to be a child’s nursery, and our kitchens may one day require drone drop-offs. As a result of fluid identities and sporadic evolution, these rooms [stages] maintain tension between one another, creating poche with potential for both formal and informal spaces.

In keeping with the parcel evolution, the constantly growing central ‘Garden’ acts as a hearth [heart] of the Home while preserving the local forests in the hands of the occupant. The cycle of the garden is paralleled only by that of the human life, and creates an alternate environmental time capsule. This parallel world not only reflects on the agency of Hollywood hyperrealities but provides the family with a sustainable lifestyle.