The design of this 3,800 square foot triplex was informed by four primary considerations: economy of space, variations in dwelling program and configuration, direct access to landscape and exterior space, and an exploration of the exterior cladding screen. The site, near the historic Colman School building, is a forty by one-hundred foot lot that slopes eight feet from west to east. The property has views of downtown Seattle across a city park to the east and north. To the south is an early twentieth-century duplex. To allow each dwelling to have a connection with a specific landscape area of the site, the sloping topography was reshaped into two distinct levels. In response to budget and strict land use limitations on building height and lot coverage, the primary form of the structure has been limited to a rectangular box. Within this box, three separate dwellings have been configured to provide direct and visual access to landscape and exterior space. Instead of constructing apartment flats based on a similar organizational typology that relies on a series of stacked bearing walls, a structural steel frame is used to provide interior bearing. Because of this, the fundamental organization of the dwelling is free to rotate or flip as each flat responds directly to different program requirements and different visual and physical landscape connections that are available at each level of the structure. Through operations of subtraction, larger scale spatial relationships are made between interior and exterior spaces. These operations create both apertures, openings that provide daylight and visual connections between inside and out, and porches, or habitable covered exterior space. Derived through both activity and environmental criteria, these apertures and porches are used to mediate street and weather exposure while filling the spaces with daylight. A horizontal 1x4 exterior cladding screen wraps the projects. Manipulation of this wood screen is used to preserve the initial figure and simplicity of the rectangular box. Finished in a white solid body stain, it is both abstract and materially expressive.
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