Le Fresnoy.
STRATEGY OF THE IN - BETWEEN
Since we were to select a project that we thought would be a significant argument to translate into a house, especially on a site like Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, I decided to pick Le Fresnoy Art Centre, by Bernard Tschumi Architects.
Le Fresnoy wouldn’t really classify as any ordinary building.
Tschumi plays a game of coexistential dilemma of two elements and the new residual space that is now created between them. The In - Between.
The way he puts it, Le Fresnoy is basically a succession of boxes inside a larger box (The roof). Where the most diverse and disparate of elements could coexist. This is what creates the In - Between, and the existing spatial heirarchy is brought into question.
And that’s what makes it even more intriguing to convert it into a house.
La Maison.
Coarctating Public and Private.
The In Between sounds perfect for a living room in a house.
So that’s exactly what happens.
The private programs of the house are now held by the roof, and the residual space between them becomes the living room. But here’s the twist: the living room is more like a yard. It’s exterior, but it is not. Well then it’s private, but is it?
Coarctated.
A home, but for Architecture.
Since the house is situated on a site that connects two streets in Boyle Heights while inhabiting a semi private/public space inside, it calls for a public program that would pull a crowd in. Now the typology of a single family home is now questioned through a programmatic clash by introducing a market underneath. This results in the private parts of the home being pushed up in the volumes above. The volumes up top remain individual rooms of a home, where the red ramps and stairs mark the way to move and in around the them, and the volumes below become parts of a small community market. The house, now suspended from the roof, never touches the market, maintaining the clash that was arranged, yet somehow both of these beasts duel, creating a residual space where the living room of the house and the public program of the market coexist. Like the Le Fresnoy (but in this case quite literally), the roof becomes the entity that holds, and frames the architecture together.
