Nestled in a serene and green neighborhood at the heart of Silicon Valley, one of the most creative communities in the world, where the future is imagined every day, this house seeks to claim its share from this innovative culture and aims to explore and adopt a contemporary architectural language and spatial quality for a single-family house.
The project is laid out in a linear east-west allowable footprint, with a brief that asks for maximizing individual spaces. To respond to all codes, contextual, programmatic considerations, the main spatial idea of the project for us was creating spaces between contraction and expansion. Instead of following conventional farmhouse typology as the dominant type of California houses and accommodating spaces in a predefined mold, the house’s form evolves through a transformation process, transitioning from a simple cube in the east to bifurcated and shifted volumes in the west. In the middle, a rebirth takes place as the volumes diverge and flow atop each other, creating a dual perspective while maintaining a unified whole. When viewed as a whole, a typological transformation occurs, and an object emerges from the building. This transfiguration creates a hierarchical spatiality that organizes spaces. Smaller individual rooms are located in the east end, while larger common spaces are situated in the expanded west. This journey from contraction to expansion enhances the experience of the space, aligning with the project’s brief and simultaneously frames the views of surroundings.
Furthermore, the house’s formal narration creates its own sculptural legibility, allowing residents to engage with it from various physical and mental perspectives. From every angle and direction, the building takes shape, changes, and the interplay of shadow and light finds a specific rhythm. Ultimately, rather than composing elements in an assembly that follows a specific plan, the house seeks to use its formal properties to organize the flow of space within the interiors, frame views, and capture light, which leads to interacting with its occupants in a deeper and, perhaps, more poetic way.