The area that we're in is Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, this is a very traditional neighbourhood and it's an extremely preservation-oriented neighbourhood, we feel very fortunate to have been able to do a contemporary building in this extremely historic context.
In order to make the project happen we needed to demonstrate contextuality of the facade, the dictate of the planning department was that we needed to use wood and we needed to have a bay window, what we did was observe those things but also do them with subtle twists that talk about the contemporary moments, the bay window is traditional in shape but the glass in the centre is oversized, also at the corner where the wood boards go from a vertical orientation to a horizontal orientation there's a CNC mill joint using contemporary technology instead of traditional craftsmanship, you could call it like digital craftsmanship.
The project has three basic components, the facade is a mask which conceals the inner life of the house but inside it's unapologetically contemporary.
The house has two zones, two different personalities, one zone is vertical, it's totally abstract, all the materiality is obscured by the blue paint, it's very immersive psychologically it's all one thing, architecturally colour is not an expensive effect it's one of the least expensive things you can do but it is still intellectually extremely daring, it's a commitment to an experience that for whatever reason there tends to be a desire with an architecture for neutrality, and on the other side it's exactly the opposite.
All of the materials are expressed, it's much more like a collage, nothing's glued together, all the materiality is raw and it's all horizontal so there's a contrasting feel between the two zones although they're open to each other, one of the details that I'm personally proudest of is that the floor is expressed like a children's version of a floor, so you see a 3/4 inch piece of plywood and then just a thickness of concrete which is how all floors are made but that's typically something that's disguised, that spirit of just expressing things happens throughout, so you're sort of living with this duality of a horizontal space where everything has its own distinct identity and is just fused together by proximity versus vertical abstraction where things are linked by colour.
It's a very delicate thing to capture, how do you do something that has spontaneity and a feeling of dynamism.
San Francisco is a city that's in love with itself and some say with good reason but it's really important for a city to continue to be relevant to embrace the current moment as well.
In classic San Francisco fashion it's hiding its contemporary nature through this metaphor of the mask.
In terms of the lighting there's two basic systems, starting In The Raw Zone we had this idea of expressing a 4x8 module of sheets that spawned the idea of just like hey let's just pull the modules apart a little bit and put LED strip lighting between those modules so it's fully integrated.
Ultimately the idea is that the entire space is tied together, that is intended to contrast with the lights on the other side in the Blue Zone we use spotlights so the lighting is more directional as opposed to a big horizontal field it allows for the differentiation because it's a less uniform space.
