As part of a semester-long project for HIAA 0100: Introduction to Architectural Design Studio, I iterated upon a series of spatial concepts to emphasize the relationship between abstract architectural ideas and the lived experience. This project is an investigation of how the house fundamentally constructs the interactions of those living together, transforming the way we live in how we navigate through social, work, and sleeping spaces.

From the starting point of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Willits House, I reimagined and transformed its spatial concepts to the context of Providence in 2020. The precedent house is taken out of its original intent for the idealized nuclear family as more people in modern day are straying away from traditional gender roles and the notion of domesticity. New configurations of living are emerging, namely in the idea of the co-op. With the advent of new technology, there is a blur between the private and public space, as people are more connected to the outside world than ever before. These shifts in our interactions with the world thereby lead to an evolution of the relationship between leisure and work space, where the two now sit in between a space of being separate and being one. Such changes all contribute to the need to reconsider the architectural formation of the house.

The house goes far beyond Le Corbusier’s assertion that the “house is a machine from living.” It does not just serve for pure functionalism but rather, the house blends into the technological and cultural norms of the time. To further explore the house as something more than a structure that only fulfills the basic requirements of shelter, I visualized the Willits House as a series of volumes and took the relationships between these volumes to produce a new prototypical architecture designed for a group of five artists living together. Their interactions with each other and with social, work, and private spaces are emphasized in the circulation of the house as one moves from one space to another.