Lincoln Street reboots a 1907 “super-bungalow” located in an established Portland, Oregon neighborhood. The principle objective of the project is to bring daylight into this formerly dark house. The existing four-story, painted shingle house is set on an oversized lot at a highly visible street corner. It features ornate and supersized Craftsman details such as cross-gabled bays and eaves with carved rafters tails and corbels.

The renovation strategy aims for maximum spatial transformation with minimal modifications to floor plan and cross section. The design largely leaves distinguishing external features of the original house in place, replacing a limited swath of the facade with a contemporary, glassy, operable, three-story chunk of architecture.

This primary intervention, oriented toward a private yard, adjacent tree canopy, and distant downtown skyline, is located on the side of the house, leaving historic features intact on the most public facades. Other exterior modifications are limited to discretely cut-in, trim-less sheets of glass at points critical for daylight balance.

The project navigates a mathematical limit on the area of the existing structure that can be modified without triggering a potentially destructive seismic upgrade. To this end, a limited area of existing exterior wall, already out-of-plane with the foundation and primary envelope, is modified.

What appears to be an addition is essentially a bay window. While adding virtually no square footage; the new window bay is composed to benefit every level of the house — connecting to each floor as it climbs the house vertically from the dining room, up to a new master suite, terminating with the new studio office on the third floor. Sidelight from the window bay is then balanced with a new light shaft at the core of the house, bringing light from above and increasing acoustical porosity.

Credits: Owen Gabbert OGLLC, Jeremy Parrish Structural Edge

Credits:
- Structural Edge - Jeremy Parrish
- OGLLC - Owen Gabbert