House of Frames I

House of Frames I is a house composed of frames: a design that followed from my doctoral thesis on Ludwig Hilberseimer and from its reading of the city, and of the building, as a composition of parts. Where the thesis read Hilberseimer’s Vertical City as a sequence of relations between cells and wholes, the house tests what one such relation, the frame set against the frame, yields when it is repeated.

Each frame is a striated bar: a stack of thin strips of unequal length, so that every edge is stepped and every surface reads as a set of contour lines. Frames are placed against frames. Where they overlap they carry one another, where they step back they leave a terrace, and where a frame stands upright it becomes a wall of vertical strips with windows between them. The rooms are the intervals the frames leave open, the structure is the mutual support of the frames, and the facade is the outer edge of the same stack: there is no second system behind the first.

The studies of April 2016 test the aggregate in several directions, frames branching from a common core, loose stacks seen from the side, a tall and narrow stack. The renderings of May 2016 fix one configuration in mauve, with a figure standing on the lower terrace to give the scale, and a separate study turns the frame into a table-like window of vertical strips. The white 3D-printed model of the same year makes the stepped edges a physical texture: photographed from the side, from above and upright it is a tower of frames; with a figure placed on one of them it is a house.