The contemporary home is a community.
It is a contradictory and kaleidoscopic space for sleeping, eating, socializing, producing, nurturing, performing, retreating, and engaging. It is private and collective, sanctuary and hub, live and work. The home remains first and foremost the shelter and hearth for the family, but the contemporary family is no longer simply nuclear; it is any group of people that choose to live together, cooperate, and share resources.
The architecture of the contemporary home must therefore be both resilient and flexible. It must inspire community and collective ownership through strong form, elegant materials, shared resources, common spaces, and overlapping circulation. But it must also avoid making judgements about the size, gender, culture, and age structure of families to nurture all possible forms and scales of living together.
Home+ is therefore both a home and more than a home. It aims to include the full range of what domestic life is and might become.
Home+ looks back to look forward. It is distinctly British in character, inspired by the traditional English Terrace which built adjacent houses up to the property line between them, creating a shared party wall and urban legibility through the replication of a consistent material palette, building height, and setbacks. The clusters of chimneys boldly expressed on the roof of the typical Victorian terraced house are retained, expanded, stripped of ornament, and rotated to becomes a central infrastructural spine within the home, and an iconic symbol of the new neighbourhood on the skyline.
Specifically, the project is organized into three clearly distinct spaces for living – 1) The Productive Core, 2) The Private Rooms, and 3) The Collective Atrium – each with its own material, organizational, technological, and economic performances. Together, these three spaces create a unified ecosystem of inhabitation. The Productive Core consolidates all infrastructure, storage, and utility spaces into one flexible band. The Private Rooms are located on one side of the core, creating more tranquil, quiet, warm, and domestic spaces to retreat and focus. Designed to be inherently flexible, a wide range of one-storey home sizes and arrangements can easily be configured. On the other side of the core is the Collective Atrium, a double-height and light-filled communal space that allows for different modes of socializing, play, work, and collective living.
