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This house acoustically liberates two musician clients, a luthier (violin maker) and pianist, in two music boxes composing a vernacular-modern homestead in Northfield, Minnesota. For their new house, the owners - both of whom grew up in farming communities - were interested in rural forms, such as the classic farmhouse-and-barn ensemble. Transforming this idea into a twin building - connected only at the basement level - also fulfills the couple’s unusual acoustic requirements. One building houses the luthier’s studio; the other houses the living spaces and a music room for the pianist, a professional accompanist. The owners’ careers are deeply rooted in tradition, creatively working within confines. The luthier crafts instruments within a narrow range, with subtle modifications transparent to most; the accompanist’s art involves interpreting music, bringing alive a text through performance. Our embrace of the vernacular vocabulary and discipline of working within it paralleled how the clients themselves work. We seized on the opportunity to forge a modern interpretation within a traditional architectural language. The twin buildings - both with identical footprints - are variations that engage in a dialogue. Developing the interstitial space between the pavilions - with trellises and stonewalls that bridge both buildings as in traditional farmsteads - was another opportunity to explore and interpret the rural tradition. If our design is about acoustic and physical separation in a building duet, construction was about furthering the emerging design on site, using a diverse group of collaborators and wide-ranging material palette. We worked with the luthier-pianist couple, a MnDOT road-crew worker, a couple of high school seniors, a retired teacher, and a freelance color consultant to incorporate 2,500 board feet of salvaged Douglas fir, 30 abandoned windows, 800 square feet of reclaimed pine sheathing, and 1,500 square feet of hem fir flooring, rescued from a nearby farmhouse in demolition. The project not only embodies a rural vernacular vocabulary, it is as well constructed in that tradition and spirit, where collective barn raising is common and re-using building materials for economy is necessary. Working with diverse talents and incorporating salvaged materials as they became available took flexibility and juggling, but the open nature of design and construction was critical to the project’s success as it unfolded. In fact, the house’s tall signature dormer directly resulted from the serendipitous nature of the process. As our team of design/builders was getting up after lunch during construction of the third floor deck, we noticed a distant hillock visible over the trees, only evident from one spot on the floor. Bringing the owner out that day, we all decided that we should capture the view, and sketched the new dormer on the floor deck, where it remains under the flooring to this day. TOP |
© 2004-07 LOCUS Architecture, Ltd.