2024
MCHAP
Six Square House
Young Projects
Bridgehampton, New York, United States
August 2021
PRIMARY AUTHOR
Bryan Nathaniel Young (Principal)
CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR
Taconic Builders (General Contractor), Silman (Structural Engineer), Coen+Partners (Landscape Architecture), Verso Works (Styling (in collaboration with Young Projects),), reSAWN Timber co. (Exterior Wood & Roof Cladding
CLIENT
Colleen Foster
PHOTOGRAPHER
Alan Tansey (information below), Tirso Dominguez, Lifestyle Production Group, Michel Zylberberg, Brooke Holm (information sent separately to Sasha)
OBJECTIVE
The client requested an architectural solution to collect various landscapes and activities around the site and serve as a central hub and gathering space. In response, the design for the Six Square House proposes a selectively truncated excerpt of a continuous planimetric tessellation of squares, equilateral triangles, and isosceles triangles. This patterning allows for the gabled ends of each square to “reach out” with multiple orientations both looking and receiving in all directions.
The pattern creates a tight cluster in plan with 3 axes of rotational symmetry. While this two-dimensional composition follows a strict internal organization, the vertical house realizes a complex spatial proposition and an unexpectedly sensitive connection to the adjacent landscape. There is an intriguing tension between the seeming indifference of the pattern’s abstract “footprint” and the nuanced physical idiosyncrasies of typology, siting, program, and structure.
The 2-D plan diagram suggests extrusion to define a set of volumes, yet the specific resolution of this extrusion undermines the legibility of its own origin by creating a spatially-charged figure resulting not only from mutations to the gabled typology, but from the way seemingly-discrete interior spaces connect together through points of intersection and continuities along the roof line. This unexpected translation establishes a series of oscillating readings that fuel the spatial ambiguity prevalent in the project. The most legible of these oscillations is the appearance of discrete volumes on the exterior contrasted against the continuously flowing interior.
CONTEXT
The Six Square House sits on a rural 2-acre property containing an 1850s historic farmhouse and several magnificent old-growth trees. The siting of the house allows for exterior landscapes and several distinct gardens to flow between and connect multiple structures including a new pool house toward the west and farmhouse addition towards the east.
Centrally locating the Six Square House and pushing it to the southern edge of the property opens dramatic view corridors across the site and creates varied and alternating exterior environments around the six gabled volumes: a wild meadow surrounding the entry; a grassy lawn adjacent to the open-air gable patio; a sunny pool terrace; and a lush fern garden adjacent to the primary suite and enveloped in the shade of a purple beech tree. The siting of the Six Square House considers the directionality of surface water across the gently sloping site, solar orientation, and cross ventilation through each of the square volumes.
The design adopts the vernacular reference of gabled barns prevalent throughout the rural landscape of the Hamptons and utilized straightforward construction techniques amenable to the client’s budget and schedule. Through a series of thoughtful geometric transformations and efficient structural continuity, a spatial proposition emerges to position the Six Square House within the architectural lineage of clustering vocabulary. Yet unlike many incarnations of this language prioritizing both looseness and the particle, the Six Square House is legible both as discrete volumes and as unified figure.
PERFORMANCE
The aspect of the Six Square House most disruptive to residential typology is the way the plan subverts traditional domestic hierarchies. The radiating sequence of equally-sized squares allows entry and circulation to flow freely with no clear front, back, or side. This spatial neutrality enables domestic program but also provides an open vessel for contemplation, political discourse, and social interaction in ways not typically associated with a single-family residence.
The openness of each square provides extreme flexibility with only the central square (kitchen) having a fixed use. The owner hosts non-profit fundraisers, pop-up design events, and curated art exhibitions – the most recent, “Bodies Under Siege,” focused on the intersection of identity, gender, racial justice, healing, power, and liberation. It is a proto-architecture interweaving qualities of domestic space with activities typically associated with the public realm.
Within the context of the property, the Six Square House sits with humility, offering a warm and tranquil gathering space for the family of three: sprawling and active during the warmer months and more intimate in the autumn and winter. The landscape evolves throughout the year and the orientation of each square’s gable focuses the interior to natural seasonal shifts in foliage and preserved old growth trees such as the gnarled oak to the east and the purple beech towards the west. New plantings such as a cluster of four ginkgoes located north of the open-air patio space have begun to recenter the dynamic landscape in which the Six Square House effortlessly rests.
