Patriece’s Home

Don’t Be Stair-tled By A Review

March 25, 2022

A student builds a section model of the house's staircase at her desk.

Hey, Hi, Hello, and welcome back to the Patriece’s Home blog! Since the last blog post, the team has been busy preparing drawings for the 5th-years Executive Review (informally know as “stress test”) with Justin Miller, Associate Professor and new Head of Auburn’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, and Rusty Smith, Associate Director of Rural Studio. The annual stress test examines each project’s potential and feasibility to continue into the summer.

In preparation, the latest designs were drawn with a greater degree of detail. (No more pochéd walls, folks!) And with the site now surveyed, the team began studying the position of the house in the surrounding landscape, focusing on forming comfortable, shaded exterior rooms.

A sketched section of creating a boundary of trees between the front porch and the driveway.
A cross section through the kitchen, porch, and attic truss.
A digital model two point perspective with ash grey siding.
A digital model two point perspective with burnished slate siding.
A digital model two point perspective with burnished slate siding and wood porches.

The reviewers challenged the team to examine and test the design’s passive heating and cooling systems. The team was also asked to address potential foundation challenges; with a eaveless house design, water may collect at the base of the wall and undermine the strength of the building’s ground connection.

Two students hold up leftover siding from old projects to see how the light reflects off of it as it is turned.
A student in front of the exterior siding of the recently completed Ophelias home.

After a unanimous thumbs-up from their reviewers, Patriece’s Home team has moved forward drawing plumbing, electrical, and lighting plans. They hope to soon order their manufactured attic trusses. The 6’ space the doubled-up trusses straddling the stairs created has facilitated a double-height celebratory space. To highlight and delight in the space, the team has also decided to clad it with a hardier, more durable wood material. 

A sketched perspective up the stairs of the double height space.
A section model of the stairs and living room.
A sketched perspective of the stairs with wood cladding implied with graphite.

The team ended the intense week of preparation and reviews with a model-stand building workshop with a group of visiting 1st-year Auburn architecture students. Everyone enjoyed getting out of Red Barn, working with fellow architecture students, and reminiscing about the old days at Dudley Hall.

Andrew Freear gives a lecture to the first years under the Great Hall at the Morrissette campus.

The team still has lots more to do! They are now drawing their most difficult details and combining them into a plan for a 1:1 mock up. They will also begin soil testing and prepare the site to build the home’s foundation! Onward and upward! Check back in a couple weeks to see how far the team gets on their 1:1 mock-up!

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A Site in Site

March 8, 2022

The Patriece’s Home team continues to present, question, revise, and present again their designs and research for an adaptable, two-story home. Visiting architects from across the country helped the team see opportunities to make an even better design!

A sketched perspective of the upstairs flexible room from the corner opposite of the window.
A sketched plan of Patriece's Second floor
A sketched perspective of the flexible from the top of Patriece's home stair.

The team decided to keep a defined room for living on the first floor that is open to the entryway and kitchen. This led to establishing two closed off rooms upstairs for bedrooms and an open space at the top of the stairs for more nuanced uses. For example, a desk could make it a study or office space, or a twin bed could turn it into a fifth bedroom. The team also realized that there is a 6-foot tributary area between the doubled-up trusses for the stairs, so they widened the dormer so that the open space can benefit from its light and the nook it creates.

However, when the team mocked up the dormer flashing detail, they began to question whether the benefits of the dormer could be achieved without the complexities created by breaking the roof plane.

A collage of the skylight diffusing light with polygal, and a wide window underneath it.
A collage of the clear box skylight and a tall window underneath.
A sketched perspective of the home's exterior with a skylight

That’s when help arrived from Mike Newman of SHED Studio and Katrina Van Valkenburgh of the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CS), both based in Chicago, IL. Mike suggested using a skylight to bring light upstairs without breaking the line of the roof. Katrina also suggested the team spend more time looking closer at the kitchenette and entryway to add opportunities for more storage in this home’s tight design. The visitors stayed a second day to host a mini workshop with the team and mock-up the skylight and storage. The outcome was the idea of having the skylight and window next to each other on the second floor—one for light and the other for framing the view as someone ascends the stairs.

Team members pose as scale figures in the blue tape mock up under the fabrication pavilion
Mike, Katrine, and Andrew Pose in front of the kitchennette mocked up in blue tape on the side of the fabrication pavilion shear wall.
Team members pose as scale figures in the blue tape mock up under the fabrication pavilion

Immediately after Mike and Katrina left, the team began preparing for the Studio’s go-to guy for masterful details, Dan Wheeler of Wheeler Kearns Architects in Chicago, IL, “Detail Dan”. The team showed him 1:1 detail drawings for the dormer and skylights, then drawings on how those changes might affect the cladding strategies for the house. They also discussed possible ways the interior stairs can be finished with a heftier material to show their significance to the home and to combat wear on this heavily used surface. Dan reviewed the team’s eave details and gave advice about the construction and expression of home’s exterior. Dan also suggested that the team streamline their window strategy by using the same few windows throughout the home, aggregating them in different ways to create repeatable details.

Team member gather around white paper and individually sketch a charrette
Dan Wheeler sketches on a drawing during their review under the Fabrication Pavilion. The team is watching him and a dog is seated watching the team.
A image of the details pinned to the fabrication pavilion that the team has hung for their review.
An interior elevation of the kitchen looking toward the dining room window.
an interior elevation of the stair wall

After all this helpful discussion, the team concluded that a low, wide window without a dormer already gives the upstairs significant light and excellent sitting views in the nook space.

Adam looks through the site level
on the right a student records infromation, in the middle a student hold the story pole, and on the right a student looks through the story pole

As an appreciated change of pace, the team lugged out their equipment and spent a day surveying their home’s site! They found out that the slopes drain well and that it is located on a road with lots of other houses nearby (good for the corner porch and a gable end approach).

Now there’s always more to do for the upcoming Executive Review in mid-March! We will get see where the home is best placed on the site and how the team is designing the foundation. They will keep drawing those 1:1 details and fine tuning the home’s systems to get the house to its best thermal performance come summer or winter! Thanks for the read, and come back soon!

three students pose in front of their drawings pinned up for review
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Getting Stair Crazy

February 17, 2022

Welcome to the February grind time, where the weather is relentless and so are the 5th-years! As the Spring semester intensifies, Patriece’s Home team is working harder than ever on their project—designing and building an adaptable, two-story house for multi-generational residents.

A panoramic shot of three team members sitting in the Newbern Library courtyard while they have a team discussion.
Lauren Working at her cluttered desk in red barn
Three team members surround their pinned up drawings under the Fabrication Pavilion and make notes.
Three students working at their cluttered desks in Red Barn.

The team was eager to dive into drawing details for the visiting reviewers. The group decided that the roof material should drape over the house and should be a different color and corrugation size than the metal siding. The porch interiors are also clad with wood “like a bite out of the apple,” as Director Andrew Freear likes to say. 

A close image of galvanized 2.5" corrogated medal, 1.25" Brown Grey colored corrogated metal, and planed white oak overlapping each other.
Three students surround siding and roofing samples layed on the ground outside.
An exploded axon diagrams Patriece's Home siding strategies.

Another thing the Studio loves about this time of year is the weekly reviews from visiting architects and friends. Anne Marie Duvall Decker and Roy Decker from Duvall Decker Architects in Jackson, MS, challenged the Patriece’s Home team to consider the home’s performance strategies before they begin construction details; the team was asked to consider fire protection and ventilating the attic insulation in their approach enclosing the attic trusses, as well as to “fine tune” the passive cooling strategies of the home by carefully selecting where fixed and operable windows are located. In response, the team is working to use the chimney effect of the stairs to their advantage.

The team continues to examine ways to keep the home affordable to build, even with a large footprint. Because this house is thermally and functionally divided in half, the homeowner could choose to finish the larger or smaller unit upon construction and finish the other unit when their living needs change (kind of like the Myers’ Home “shell” research).

A one point perspective sketch from the front door side, looking through Patrice's home front porch.
Fours students stand in front of their presentation while Duvall and Decker listen. One student is pointing toward a drawing.
A sketched interior perspective of the Home's kitchen looking toward the stairs. The room is furnished with a table, cabinets, and appliances.

Not long after this review, the team FINALLY got to meet Patriece!! An exterior massing model showed her how the house would look from the outside, and an unfolding interior model helped the team walk Patriece through the home and show her adaptations to each room by moving modeled furniture. And she liked it! With her approval, the team can begin to conjecture how her family will use the home and how further decisions will keep it comfortable throughout her life. 

A student guestures toward a half inch scale interior model of the home.
The team poses with Patriece in front of two models of the home.
A student holds up an exterior massing model of the home in red barn.

Most recently, the team had a day of review and workshops with Tod Williams and Billie Tsien from Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Partners in New York City, NY. They said that the team’s concept was very clear, so now they should loosen up a bit to make the social spaces of the home even nicer and more useful. Tod and Billie also encouraged the team to make spaces at the top and bottom of the stairs that use the light from the dormer window and allow someone to enjoy being on the kitchen landing. 

Four students and three reviewers surround a presentation under the Fabrication Pavilion.
An exterior sketch of the front porch corner of the house.

The team has a lot to work with from these meetings and much to prepare for the meetings to come! They are going to begin surveying the site to find where the best location is to place the home. The team is also going push the house’s details and construction decisions forward as they get closer to the final review of the semester. There’s much more to come for Patriece’s Home—thanks for reading and keeping up with us! 

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Where Do We Stair-t?

February 4, 2022

Patriece’s Home team was busy over their winter break continuing to work on their adaptable, two-story house intended for multi-generational residents. With some insightful feedback from Soup Roast, Rural Studio’s final fall review event, the design has been rigorously refined and tested over the past month to make the home more easily adaptable. The laundry room in the house now has two potential locations, so it is accessible whether the home is used as one unit or two. The team has also begun drawing the home’s interior elevations to evaluate how comfortable the rooms are to live in, to determine the exact best placement of windows, and discover opportunities for storage in underutilized spaces. 

They have also gotten an early jump on engineering their attic trusses. The team’s design will use an existing bearing wall to decrease the lumber size of the trusses’ bottom chord.

Additionally, the team has begun drawing their construction documents and developing a slight roof overhang to protect the home’s windows from the wash of roof water. 

Last week the group had a review with John Forney, an architect and friend of the Studio based out of Birmingham, AL, that allowed them to prove that their research is relevant by using “scenario buffering” to scheme all of the possible adaptations for this house. 

In the next couple of weeks, the team will also make decisions on materials to begin drawings their details. They plan to meet with their client Patrice to learn how this home might actually be lived in and placed on the site. The team can’t wait!

Also, due to the upcoming weekly guest reviews, February will be full of old friends of the Studio as well as new faces! We’re excited to see everyone!

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Ingredients for Stair Soup

December 16, 2021

Patriece’s Home has been diligently refining their plans (and sections and perspectives) to decide what scheme of a closable adaptable unit in a home works best. The team affectionately renamed their shotgun scheme to the “Hotdog” and the wrapping scheme to the “Hamburger,” and it was apparent before reviews began that the Hamburger scheme is what the team wants to continue with! 

The Hamburger has a corner porch that is an easier approach to place on a variety of sites while also condensing its main circulation in one path through the home’s center. The team has also taken the Myers’ Home team’s approach to rooms without names and applied it to their own definition of adaptability. Now the team is designing rooms that change names, so some living and bedrooms that are easy to rearrange without demolition or constructing immovable fixtures are designed so they can comfortably flip their program as the homeowner needs. 

A plan view of the team's hamburger scheme shows landscaping leading to a gable end approach. A closed door in the center of the plan shows the ground floor can be separated into two halves.

On the Tuesday of Soup Roast, the reviewers discussed the nuances of how the home will be used and pointed out to the team where their project could use some development. And to be even more helpful, the reviewers stayed in Newbern to do a workshop with the team. They got into the details of how eaves (or no eaves) could be detailed, the successes of the dormer, and encourage the team to get a closer view of their design by drawing all the interior elevations of the building. 

As the team continues to work through the Christmas break, come back in 2022 to see them jump into finer details of the project!

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