Multifamily housing for the city of Marfa, Texas. Hybridizing two different building typologies, the courtyard house and the standalone house, a new kind of housing form is shaped to respond to Marfa’s cultural, economic, and natural context. A long, low, linear building divides the sites into a series of open courts. Protected by building on three sides, these spaces result in semi-private communal areas that remain connected to the street. Rather than an object on the site, the building becomes a thickened line set within and softly buffered from the street by its surrounding landscape.