Townhouse

The townhouse is an efficient way of building houses at the end of the 20th century. This efficiency creates a close relationship between the house and the street, with the linear massing being the face of the street where the garage entrance and driveway are articulated. The layout itself is very compact following the central staircase to which the internal spaces continue. We see these original attributes as high quality architectural and urban design values that inspire the creation of new layers. We are adding a layer of insulation to the north street façade to preserve as much of its original tectonics and depth as possible. We are adding a conservatory/terrace module to the south elevation, which extends the internal wing and creates a space between the house and garden that was previously absent. The addition of the conservatory is intended to serve as a precedent for the rowhouse neighbours, in an attempt to create a continuous layer of terraces and screening that is a kind of parallel to the street façade. This new layer is designed as a subtle columnar structure of recycled aluminium and glass panels. On the ground floor, we seek to support the character of the overflowing living space, which is enlarged to include a dining room in place of the exterior loggia, which is a proxy for the added conservatory. Upstairs in the night section, we minimize the hallways and add this space to the rooms. The townhouse lives in various scaled parallels: facades, streets, gardens, sections, interior tracts. Our intention was to support and deepen this concept, to improve the internal space and its relationship with the surroundings, which is limited in this typological type of house.