Slot House

Renovation of a small house in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn, NY.

An architect aspires to add to the community; more often than not by filling in the open gaps. This project chooses another approach: to cultivate what is there. The key decision was to keep a 60' maple and the opening in the street wall that it held. The little house behind was adapted to act as a canvas for both.

The first move was to cut a slot to allow the tree to be seen from inside. This revealed a cedar frame infilled with handmade brick underneath the sheetrock and vinyl siding. The slot became the spatial idea of the house, and is repeated to extend the house vertically and horizontally.

The resulting interior is an open, vertical “loft” that reveals the archaeology of the original structure. Program and construction are cautiously stripped to bare bones. Space is collected through establishing material and compositional families that quietly repeat from front curb to back deck.

Building Brooklyn Design Award, AIA Housing Committee Design Award 2006, AIA Small Project Practitioners Citation 2006.