A house for a couple, two children and a collection of photographs in a residential area with plenty of greenery. The client wanted to create a lifestyle that blends the photographs with their daily life.
Different elements are separated yet connected.
The site is a residential area built on a plateau and the site, including the surrounding land, is elevated 1m-2m above the road. In continuity with this stepped environment, we created a house with three external levels and five internal levels. The disparity between the interior and exterior levels allows the eye to pass not only through the floor level, but also diagonally upwards and downwards to view the mix of family life, photo collections, garden scenery and falling light from a variety of angles and distances. To ensure that the sense of distance is not constant, the perspective is varied by changing the size of the textures at four levels on the outside and four levels on the inside. All the elements that make up the house maintain a sense of distance from each other, yet are connected.
Window and photograph, two openings.
The placement of the photograph in the interior of the house. The house is a place for family life, a place that needs to be connected to the outside. By placing photographs there, it would be a mutually beneficial relationship for both the house and the photographs. To this end, we carefully planned the walls for the placement of the artworks.
The walls of the house had to have openings. We assumed that the client's collection of photographs would be the opening to the view through the lens. The two openings, one in the form of a photograph and the other in the form of a window of the house, were placed on the wall as a set. The window connects the interior with the view behind it. On the other hand, the views connected by the photographs are different in season, time and place. By placing them side by side, it can be said that the view here and now and the view somewhere else can be experienced simultaneously.
For example, we placed Ryan McGinley's photograph of a meadow next to the opening overlooking the south garden. The garden here and the meadow somewhere appear simultaneously and are related. The view from the window changes only slightly with the seasons and the passage of time, while the landscape of the photographs remains the same.
The presence of two types of openings in the house, and the fact that they can be seen from different perspectives in three dimensions, creates a living environment in which different landscapes, time and daily life intermingle.