“If flatness were funny, a dinner plate would be hilarious.”

-W. Moers

“When you’re on a highway, viewing the western US with the mountains and the flatness and the desert and all that, it’s very much like my paintings.”

-E. Ruscha

Situated in the front range of the Rocky Mountains, just 20 minutes' drive west of Denver, the House with Four Fronts is a meditated elaboration of the historic typology of the “false front” building typology common to the American West. The building, a small mountain cabin, is constituted of four separate weathered enclosures cloistered around a sunken central courtyard. Each enclosure maintains its own enlarged outer edge in order to collect covered and uncovered outdoor space at each corner of the collection of buildings. This allows the project to present four separate fronts while collecting into a single individual object. The part-to-whole relationship of the project is reinforced further with the introduction of a twenty-degree kink in the geometry of the plan, thrusting the concrete block patio and foundation into a serrated angle and forcing a false impression of enlarged or pinched scale depending on the vantage of the observer. The cladding of the fronts to the building are an unconventional two-way lapped clapboard assembly intended to sandwich insulation and a moisture barrier without covering the frame in any chemically treated plywood sheathing. The textural effects of the cladding as shown in the drawings are intended to be manifested on the building through a layer of bituminous paint and drawn lines.

The project, set to be constructed in a bowl-like impression along a ridge in the mountains, is shown here as it is conceived, as a structure isolated within its own terrarium landscape. The drawings and photos exaggerate this intentionally while emphasizing the flatness and immaterial aspects of the building. By equivocating the building to the drawing of the building, the observer of the project becomes an active investigator in the authenticity and veracity of the image.

The deeper project nested in its conception is about doing more with less, and operating under a philosophy of construction at odds with the trends of the past 30 years. By keeping the gross area of each shelter under 200 square feet, it allows the structure to fall into a regulatory loophole that gives it autonomy from building and zoning codes in the municipality it will be constructed in. This allows for the building to challenge accepted standards of insulation and comfort by embracing the spirit of the campsite. “What tomorrow’s comfort might look like can be glimpsed by looking both back into the past and forward to the cutting edge of contemporary practice. Design strategies and social practices that we already know of and can implement now have the potential to address the costs of this fossil-fueled conditioning and adjust our relationship to comfort accordingly.”(1)

Barber, Daniel A., et al. “Editorial.” After Comfort: A User’s Guide - Daniel Barber et Al., 1 Oct. 2023, www.e-flux.com/architecture/after-comfort/568230/editorial/.

History Colorado Musuem

Denver, Colorado, 2021

“It was the Denver Night; All I did was die.”

-J. Kerouac

“I’m still not inviting you to Casa Bonita”

-Kyle

The story of Denver’s distinctly unique brand of American building is one defined by a material subculture rooted in boom-bust economics, an atomized model of infill development, and a predilection towards catalog-copy detailing and a “we will figure it out” mentality. These contributing factors result in a largely heretofore untold story of cheap, fast, and good building that is uniquely "Denver.” At the base of the Rocky Mountains, on the edge of the midwestern plains, Denver’s creative identity is clearly of both regions and yet stands as its own condition. Likewise, Denver situates on the margin of our continental point of orientation between East-West and North-South, unquestionably central yet unquestionably isolated. Its geographic distance from adjacent major metropolitan areas and creative centers has encouraged a wildly diverse and distinct building culture born from an unmistakably identifiable viewpoint on materiality, industrialization, and the common availability of off-the-shelf resources.

Normal, Denver: Field Reports from a Margin draws together an array of 111 buildings that are distinctly normal to Denver yet are indicative of a unique regional voice. “Normal” is here defined as an average or usually typical state within an individual environment. For us, it sets a baseline understanding of what is in fact quite distinct from a global perspective. Understanding these influences and trends that define what is “normal” within our own context can inform a more complete view of what makes us delightfully unusual. Collected herein is a field guide to the buildings and conditions within our city that are indicative of a more common understanding of what makes Denver so unique. Often highly individualized, the various species of buildings that make up our city represent a trove of content from a largely undocumented architecture culture. Representative of the many social and economic forces at play through the city’s history, Denver is made first by and for its people with their many diverse histories. From a margin, Denver buildings point to an attitude towards commodity, temporality, and artifice that is instructive of a clear position on the trajectories of a more inclusive view of the American vernacular of the 21st century.

Normal, Denver was installed in the atrium of the History Colorado Museum in downtown Denver. The installation involved constructing a room within the museum to house the 111 original drawings on display. Made up of four "roofs" huddled together and covered in roofing paper, the room creates a totalizing environment within which to view the drawn works.

project team: Ramiro Castillo, Trevor Carrasco, Chauncey Queen-Booker, Benjamin Pitney, Illiana Ramirez, Emanuil Sklianin, and Mo Zaina

Leadville, Colorado , 2019-Present

Award, 69th Annual Progressive Architecture Awards

“The idea was to give each person their own room—instead of the usual distribution—and to do most of the cooking right on the table—making it more a social campfire affair”

-R. Schindler

“…the _____ House comes disturbingly near to being a totally new beginning”

-R. Banham

Table Cabin is a lean and discrete form of primitive domesticity. The cabin is conceived for a site without water rights or access to utilities. Built on the typology of the settler’s cabin, it is a campground whose prime viable assets are its isolation from the outside world and its access to viewsheds in the surrounding mountain valley. As such, Table Cabin is a warm repose separated from the world around it. A simple shelter constructed from conventional and readily accessible materials out of expedience and in search of novelty.

The cabin is a double-height wood-framed enfilade of living and dining spaces linked into an eight-foot wide corridor. The six-room linear configuration of the main level of the domestic structure allows for scaled privacy with sliding doors at each interior threshold.

Above the level of the door head in each room, nets are strung into the attic creating lofted sleeping quarters above. By leveraging this ample ceiling height, the house borrows a second floor without formally structuring it. The nets are accessed by hanging ladder and provide ample private sleeping space separated by the walls of each room. Access to the main house occurs at each room with an array of 14 doors distributed across the building façade in an even meter. These doors take over the role of the window, allowing for the elimination of conventional glazing. At times when the house is completely shuttered, daylight is gained through the insulated translucent polycarbonate roof.

The cabin is constructed utilizing an inventive approach to framing that utilizes stacked plywood for framing plates as an in-process evolution of simple conventional practices in platform frame construction that projects a clear direction forward in addressing vernacular American construction means and methods. The cabin will be constructed using 70% sourcing of lumber through offcuts of 2x4 and 2x6 lumber purchased through a recycling and salvage yard in Denver. Sorted into lengths ranging from two to four feet, the diminutive lumber sizing requires that the structure be built up into a series of framed platforms rather than a single conventionally built wall assembly. Each framing level is seated on a sandwich of four sheets of 1/2” OSB milled in a correlating stepped geometry. The apparent innovation in the project lies not in its use of lumber, but rather the use of conventional flatbed CNC milling in a simple and fast way to ensure precision and cost control for an otherwise highly articulated geometry.

By fitting the CNC workflow to tools commonly found in cabinet and carpentry shops around the Denver area, the production process can be easily replicated in future uses with minimal customization. The stacked plywood plates at each “level” are milled off-site to ensure accuracy without field measurement of the articulated geometry of the wall layouts. This mid-rise-in-miniature method of framing allows for the elevation to be developed into a single tapered mass without the need for field measurement. This out-of-scale articulation of levels lends itself to some play with the scale of interior spaces. The cabin is a single mass tapering into the six individual rooms from bottom to top and expressed at the exterior.

The structure is clad in a bituminous asphalt roofing membrane. By lapping the roof membrane up the building using a three-foot wide sheet of material, a meter begins to develop in dialogue with the structure. A simple linear pattern is roughly drawn onto the roof membrane as it laps up the façade, generating a disjunction between the legibility of the object and the staggered steps of its assembly. The use of a common sheet-applied roofing material is common in regional vernacular cabins from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The “tar paper shack,” the cheapest manifestation of the log cabin, was seen as the most cost efficient and expedient construction typology from this period, and the mountain region is still littered with their dilapidated remains. A byproduct of this lost typology remains today in the Colorado region, where roofing materials can be commonly found applied to facades in abundance, particularly in the Denver area’s prolific “Neo-Mansard” style structures of the mid-twentieth century. The roofing material provides a fast and low-cost solution to the envelope that ensures water-tightness without the need for miscellaneous metal flashing.

A scrappy and minimal dwelling, Table Cabin takes on the barest form of structured domesticity to provide a private second home for the two families who commissioned it. Not intended to be occupied year-round, it is a fixed campsite away from the urban bustle of Denver and the increasingly congested campsites of the mountain communities of Colorado. The reduction of complication that the cabin provides is a relief from the increasing connectedness and concern of contemporary life. Representing a return to primitive adjacency to the remote outdoors, Table Cabin provides a new form to a long-established rural typology.

New York, New York, 2021

“First, the object is registered as a pure extension, as flat shape which never breaks rank with the picture’s frontality to suggest a turning of one of its facets into depth. Second, the constellation of objects wedge together in that insistent continuity of edges which the Purists called ‘mariage de contours’. Third, color and texture are handled in a manner that calls attention to the inherent superficiality of these ‘secondary qualities.’”

-R. Krauss

“Let the Wild Rumpus start!”

-M. Sendak

An annual gathering and celebration of nearly 2000 members of the New York architecture community, the Beaux-Arts Ball was moved to a virtual setting for the 2021 iteration. Annually inviting young designers to orchestrate the backdrop of the Ball, this year’s iteration pulled together KEVIN HIRTH Co., NEME Studio, and composer Evan Zierk to design and coordinate a space to come together. “This Is Not A Beaux Arts Ball,” hosted in the nascent digital world of SpatialWeb, was conceived as a response the limitlessness of a virtual space. For the event, two desks were pushed together. One from each design studio. On each desk, guests encounter coffee mugs, X-Acto knives, sticky notes, and other ephemera at Lilliputian scale.

On the HIRTHCo desk, a large model sits to the side dwarfing other objects. Conceived as a room within the room of the party, the model presents an inversion of expectations of interiority and exteriority. Stepping inside, guests find themselves suddenly walking out the back door of the party and out under the night sky. Using developed texture and flattened spatial depth, the room uses immersive sound and scaled objects returning their expected size to create a relief from the vastness of the larger virtual environment.

The conception of the desk and its forested model sprang from an interest in capturing the simultaneous release and enclosure of an outdoor room. Soft-edged and never quite fixed under the night sky, the forested room is both domestic and other. The experience for the event guest was one of layered experience. In their own homes, participating through a screen, the guests find themselves in a room within a room that is at once a fixed enclosure and a vast and limitless expanse. The effects achieved were facilitated by a careful calibration of drawn flat planes layered into a six-level elevational stack encircling the domestic form of the object of the model in its interior.

Denver, Colorado, 2016-2018

No inhibitions should be placed upon the individual’s desire to build! . . . If one of these ramshackle structures built by its occupants is going to collapse, it generally starts cracking first so that they can run away.

—Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Geometry has an ambiguous reputation, associated as much with idiocy as with cleverness.

—Werner Oechslin

The Mother-in-Law’s House is located behind a Denver family’s urban home, sited to take advantage of a density incentive in the city’s zoning code. It rises from an inflected 10-foot-by-10-foot footprint, preserving open space in the backyard while maximizing occupiable space within the structure.

The result, a tower in miniature, offers four levels. It stands in the center of the block and rises above the roofs of neighboring buildings. Because of its unusual scale and articulation, it hides in plain sight. The inhabitant of the tower is relegated to the position of a voyeur, sleeping between the backyards of neighbors.

The design takes advantage of an unconventional geometry to create a challenging, contemporary approach to a traditional building type: the load-bearing brick structure. Zippered brick corners break down the monolithic brick tower, exposing the four layers of brick required to structure and insulate a load-bearing brick building.

Folly/Function Competition Honorable Mention

New York, New York, 2019

“If their work is satisfying, people don’t need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.”

-J.G. Ballard

Short Stack is a kiosk that does its work while clearly at leisure. Rather than pose the serious face or pretend towards austerity, it is a clear demonstration of stripped and clear function. It is a shelter that houses seating. It has a closed cabinet for storing salable goods and paper products. It has a light. It is shelter. At a bare minimum, it accomplishes it’s required tasks. It, however, does so with aplomb. Short Stack stands dutifully with purpose, but does so as if satisfied with the work that it does.

Short Stack will be a new character for the diverse collection of structures and works that populate the park surrounding it. The disposition of its assemblage and nature are distinctly reflective of this unique urban environment.

Architectural League Prize Exhibition, Parsons School of Design

New York, New York, 2017

I steer clear of graveyards; They are cliché; In my death-obsessed generation; No one should ever have to look at themselves

—Will Toledo

This coordinated exhibit of a large collage and selection of paper models was installed at the Parsons School of Design to commemorate Kevin’s receipt of the Architectural League of New York’s League Prize. It is a collapsed visual field representative of the monumental Colorado landscape. Situated across this landscape, six unbuilt works are collected together in the context that informed and inspired them. In the tradition of the 17th century ‘capriccio’, these works are realized in their grandest form imaginable.

As a body of work viewed in total, each project supports the next to create a greater whole. Sparsely scattered among these projects are a series of blank figures, placed to imply anticipated future work. Unambiguously typological in nature, the projects before you use uncomplicated primary geometry in unexpected configurations to exist in concert with the grandiose context of Colorado. Much like Aldo Rossi’s Scientific Autobiography, the work is cast as a set of characters arranged together to create a provocative scene. The models, made of the same paper as the collage, appear to be torn from the wall and draped over a table.

The genesis of these projects take many forms. They are unceremoniously stripped from architectural history, photography, twentieth century art, and industry. Taken as a whole and assembled together, the visual impact of the installation addresses issues of temporality, monumentality, and context. 

To download a .pdf of the associated submission portfolio, click here.

Commerce City, Colorado, 2020-2021

“from distances; engines cry their way to me”

-C. Oldenburg

Cervantes Garage is a garage for a plumber seeking shelter for his fleet of box trucks outside of Denver. The proposal, currently under development, is an articulation of research into vernacular barn structures in rural Colorado. Utilizing a balloon framing system and bituminous roofing paper cladding, the building seeks to articulate an innovative approach to construction that relies on inexpensive materials and methods. It is a large garage.

“Translating The Building” Gallery Show, McNichols Civic Center Building

Denver, Colorado, 2019

What you see before you is an image of a room in an imaginary tower that is filled with architectural drawings, models, and images of that imaginary tower. From this room you can see into the tower again, looking in on this imaginary tower’s rooms and inhabitants.

The tower, a proposal for a mixed use commercial and residential development occupying a block on the edge of downtown Denver, is in fact 9 uniform buildings linked by a podium. Each tower looks through the next, using a spare brick and glass cladding system to egalitarize the entirety. Distinctly uniform, yet broken and tapered, the towers unite public and private space in a gesture towards a more transparent way of living and working. The plinth, as a uniting urban space, is shared by all. In this linked and layered building, the direct cohesion of the greater whole takes on greater importance than any individual part.

Breaking the common expectation for a “selfie moment” or single space that draws people together, the entire complex is a reflection and exhibition of the individual. Like looking into a funhouse mirror, the building shows us back to ourselves at every turn.

Drawing Improper

Denver, Colorado, 2020

Drawing Improper was an exhibition of 56 drawings submitted for display by 28 architectural practices from around the world. The drawings respond to a simple prompt: How is the act of architectural drawing dutiful? How can it be mischievous? This prompt, unqualified with signifying explanation, yielded a wide array of responses exercising across the spectrum of architectural practice from the highly practical to the whimsical. Drawing is the central activity of the architect, and therefore is wielded with a vast flexibility of intent and result. Through the introduction of a dichotomy, Dutiful or Mischievous, the exhibition exposes the value of pragmatism in the production of architecture. In some cases a drawing is produced with rigor towards the dogmatically reductive intent of instruction of bare reality. In others, a drawing is an open-ended exploration with no fixed outcome or product in mind. In this sense, Drawing Improper is a declaration of the outer scopes of our practice. By exposing the polyamorous interests of the various corners of our discipline, the resulting exhibition is a declaration of the diversity of thought and approach within the field of architecture at large.

The exhibition of drawings was constructed and installed in an event space with only eleven feet of linear wall area. As such, freestanding walls were constructed to generate a second room within the space of the exhibit. By misappropriating conventional framing strategies, the walls of the gallery were allowed to float free in the room without anchors or supports. Clad in a black bituminous roofing fabric, the room was both dark and quiet, transforming a space typically bustling with light, activity, and sound reverberation. The room became a venue for contemplation and reflection on the activities of architectural production.

Drawing Improper, organized and installed in partnership with Anca Matyiku (Assistant Professor, University of Cincinnati), was installed and opened with a symposium on March 6, 2020. It was publicly open for five days before institutional closure and eventual disassembly in the face of the emerging pandemic. Drawings for the exhibit were submitted by Current Interests, Perry Kulper, Frank Fantauzzi & Charie O’Green, CJ Lim, Lanza Atelier, NEME Studio, Norman Kelley, Office CA, William O’Brien Jr., The Open Workshop, Outpost Office, T8 Projects, Nada Subotincic, SORT // Studio, Variable Projects, Mark West, Design Earth, Alam Profeta, Studio Ames, Studio Sean Canty, Now Here, Bair Balliet, JaJa Co, CJ Lim, Medium Office, HouMinn, EXTENTS, and Hume Coover Studio.

Gunnison, Colorado, 2012 - 2013

Freeness in architecture is a concept that consumes and absorbs everything like a black hole . . . My understanding is that our current age not only accepts such possibilities but also seems to need them.

—Junya Ishigami

Oh no. Looks like I’m seeing more of my old man in me.

—Mac DeMarco

Designed in response to a client’s wishes to provide overnight guests with a unique view of her extensive property, Campground is suspended above the sloped side of a mountain valley. The camping platform floats between existing trees, using them for structural support. A central stack of four precast-concrete pillars frames a ladder and shelter for two open hearths. The scalloped articulation on the underside of the platform conceals any other structure, reinforcing the sense of weightlessness and tension.

This introduction of a platform to the forest is at once a counter to the rough terrain of the site and a complement to the monumentality of the mountain forest. Overnight guests are afforded safety from wildlife and encouraged to float among the trees.

Denver, Colorado, 2016 - 

Every bygone period which shaped a real cultural life had the power and the capacity to create these symbols . . . Periods which exist for the moment have been unable to create lasting monuments.

—Josep Lluís Sert, Fernand Léger, Sigfried Giedion

Monotonous obviousness is being replaced by surprise. The essential viewpoint is from inside, not from outside. The subject–object relationship has been done away with.

—Reinhard Gieselmann, Oswald Mathias Ungers

The urban monument is architecture’s version of the political or social epilogue. Societies construct monuments for the principles that represent their highest ideals but that are in jeopardy of passing from memory. Historic moments that have lodged in the public consciousness are manifested as revered places in the civic physical environment. Monuments are the embodiment of a society’s better self. In our unsettling time, Monument stands for the aspiration toward forward momentum in an environment of friction created by social and political regression. Monument remains unspecified, asking the observer to consider what is worth memorializing today before it slips away. 

Due to its cost and poor insulating qualities, stone block has been demoted to a thin surface material since the mid-twentieth century. Monument reappropriates the load-bearing stone block structure to counter contemporary construction trends, thrusting the block back into its original role as a structural material. The expressed crenelation of the sloped block walls create an impression of the pyramids of ancient Egypt and Central America built in miniature. This play of scale against memory reinforces the question of the role of the monument in the early twenty-first century.

Los Angeles, California, 2017-2019

“I wouldn’t propose to burden any client with whimsical things. It is my hope to provide them with a practical building.”

-Edward Durell Stone, 1966

“Why should we always go through the same volume of space? Why should we have to go through doors always? There are all kinds of fascinating possibilities here. Why should our buildings be earthbound, anchored to a little spot on earth?”

-Bruce Goff, 1967

The ordinary and unusual often collide in architecture. The House Up Benedict Canyon is a study in the seams of this intersection. The design, an addition and renovation to a 1970 home at the bottom of a ravine in the hills above West Los Angeles, is a reflection on the stark simplicity and restraint of the existing house. A blank 9-square box, the existing bungalow uses an early-modern pastiche to play against the verdant blanket of California vegetation set behind and up its receding hillside property.

Rather than combat or resituate this approach, the addition plays up a sense of the generic and blank. The form of the addition is rendered elastic in its rough stucco façade, bent to suit the constraints of a site that is heavily impacted by a restrictive zoning code. The walls of the addition are pulled away from each corner, revealing the massing as an assemblage of frontices held together by deep window wells linking them together.

The addition is pulled back away from the street to respect municipal requirements for providing light and air onto a public right-of-way that is compressed down to a single lane dedicated for two-way traffic. The resultant sense of compression up the street is impacted further upon entry by a ground floor vestibule that requires a spiral staircase to gain access to the main level of the house. This compression is rewarded with an immediate expansion into the deep valley of the back yard. The addition above presses up against this back garden with deep wide openings carved to maximize the view up the hill. 

The House Up Benedict Canyon is a synthesis of the blank aspects of a typological generic into a distorted contextual language. The addition is a foil, a character cast at odds and somehow in concert with the existing house. Viewed as two members of the same family but of a different species, this house of merging parts is emblematic of the idiosyncrasies of a piece of Los Angeles that exists both outside its norms and very much at its heart.

Lake Forest, Illinois, 2019

“The main ideas that ____ ___ ___ ____ speculated and tested in this project were: architecture as background for people, absolute minimum use of elements, how far one could go in a unified space (what had to be closed, what could be opened), how far one could go in simplifying the unconventional living idea and how to live within it.”

-Myron Goldsmith

50x50 is a structure for performance and flexible interaction. It is a wood frame cast into the clearing that transmits its flexibility not through adaptability but rather through open fixity.

50x50 is a square within a square within a square within a ring. With overlapping scaled readings of interiority, it accepts open interpretation for the use of its center and edge. It implies a domestic scale with a reading of it’s various ‘rooms.’

50x50 responds to the historic ring by generating layers of space that interconnect visually. The original ring separated the audience from the stage with visual stages components. The columns and arborvitae were intended to mediate the edge between performer and audience.

50x50 replicates and repeats this device into three dimensions, creating a layered garden theater.

50x50 is raw structure. On it sit five figures loosely assembled. There is a column, a chimney, a wall, a roof, and a rug. These oversized objects are lightweight, hollow, rigid, and reconfigurable. They are easily moved by a handful of willing participants.

50x50 is constructed of simple materials with a tectonic logic focused on an economy of assembly. The detail of the post and beam connection generates the inflections of the plan, maintaining a native inference between parts and the whole.

50x50 is coded through three elevational datums. One at eye height (5’-0”), one just below eye height (4’-0”) and one demarcating the interior open room of the project. This visual coding oscillates the frame in perspective, complicating the thicket of wood and territorializing the line of the horizon.

50x50 is an unconventional living idea. It is a place for all parts of life to take place through performance. Life, a performance of sorts, is reflected in the stark impassivity of the grid and the transitory migration of its loose parts.

2014

Where the possibility of measurement is in doubt, line cannot have been used with absolute purity.

—Paul Klee

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.

—Andy Warhol 

Sol LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes (1974) presents 122 cubes drawn in isometric projection on a grid. Like many of the artist’s works, this one documents all possibilities within a set of constraints he established. It stands as a symbolic closing statement of the late modern movement. 

In the 2010s, the open nature of contemporary design culture is at once separate from and inclusive of both the modern and postmodern.  

Incomplete Open Variations of Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes demonstrates the often messy overlap between purely geometric indexical modes of production and symbolic referential ones. The cubes do not reflect a parametric approach, nor do they imitate a particular precedent. They utilize an open interpretation of LeWitt’s methodology while accepting and pursuing form without limit or meaning.

Each cube is drawn based on a systemic distortion of the set of rules created in LeWitt’s original work. By stripping form of meaning, the project generates familiar-seeming content without intention or irony. The degree to which form exists in near limitless variety makes it impossible to choose a path without attaching meaning to that path.

Executed without assistance from parametric software, the project has to date realized 6,534 cubes. The irresolvable Incomplete Open Variations of Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes stands as a proxy for the restlessness of our present.

Denver, Colorado, 2015-2016

How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon.

—Dr. Seuss

Burn through your virtue. We got time to waste some time

—Harlem Shakes

Conceived for a family seeking to buy a corner lot in Denver, the House on a Fence reflects an unconventional approach to interpreting the city’s zoning code, creating unexpected opportunities within the urban setting. Designed to conceal the interior and exterior domestic space of a single-family residence, the house is a play on the traditional courtyard house and the scale of domesticity.

The project uses the maximum allowable fence height as a horizontal datum. Sitting low on the street and submerged partially into the site, the house is situated below this datum, and under the canopies of surrounding trees and plantings, but just above eye level. Rather than providing views into neighbors’ windows, rooms are oriented around skylights that look up into the canopy.

Two studio towers flank the main house. Facing one another across a planted roof, these small-scale workspaces give the owners privacy to work from home while allowing them to see and signal one another from afar.

Buena Vista, Colorado, 2010 - 2013

His face was neither handsome nor anything else. It just was.
—Tarjei Vesaas

All houses are beautiful.
—Jacques Fillon

The Bacon House stacks one courtyard building atop another. Designed for a client who has retired from public life, it is sited within a corridor of working cattle ranches in the Rocky Mountains.

Local zoning mandates that limited the number of habitable structures on the site challenged the owner’s wish to create a compound that could accommodate his family for longer visits. As a response, the design nests a collection of cabins on the second level above a public level. The self-contained suites are situated around a central stair and upper terrace. An array of cloistered outdoor spaces surrounds the house, enabling year-round family gatherings within the walls of the house’s protective structure.

A two-part material strategy diffuses the tension between the domestic character of the building and the monumentality of the stacked, offset courtyard typology. The base of the house consists of chalky white brick, while the upper courtyard is expressed in whitewashed clapboard siding. The result is a courtyard building at the smaller scale of the cabin. This articulation breaks down the uniformity of the residence’s protective perimeter.

Breckenridge, Colorado, 2013 - 2014

To make the not always obvious distinction between transitory and constituent facts is [the historian’s] own personal responsibility.

—Sigfried Giedion

Left to their own devices, Americans do not monumentalize or make architecture.

—Reyner Banham

The House for Two Families is a reflection on the elasticity of dividing interior and exterior space in a shared domestic environment. A vacation residence designed for two families on a wooded site, the house consists of three levels. The partially submerged lower level situates living and dining spaces just above the forest floor. The upper level is split into two equal suites of two bedrooms and a den at the canopy of the surrounding trees. The open central level connects the upper and lower halves and provides common space for both families.

This middle level is at once a light well, front porch, back patio, roof deck, balcony edge, and courtyard. Placing these open-air gathering spaces within the forest canopy increases privacy, creating a sense of outdoor enclosure. The void buffers public and private quarters to provide a sense of solitude unusual in a vacation cabin, a building type that is ordinarily crowded. In this way, it is a threshold that sees constant movement from public to private—an inconvenience that requires a commitment to move from private bedroom to public dining room, and a connection to the outdoors.