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X House Ranch House Moonstone House Nazareth House Beach House Jellyfish House Moonstone House
Vanguard Firm designs for Rhode Island wetlands
Rather than buying a diminutive pied-a-terre in the city, a young Manhattan couple instead opted to buy 42 acres of land in Rhode Island to build their new home. Despite the property’s considerable size, its location within a wetlands preservation area meant that only two acres actually could support construction. The couple commissioned WORK AC, a young New York City-based firm that was a RECORD Vanguard firm this year and whose principals, Dan Wood and Amale Andraos, both came from Rem Koolhaas’s WORK AC .
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WORK combines qualities rarely found in tandem: distinctive formal sensibilities with principles of sustainable design, not to mention a certain stylistic authority earned in part from their time with Koolhaas. Their design for the Moonstone house engages all of these qualities. The architects arrived at a two-story L-shaped form, allocating public and private functions into discrete zones. Double-height spaces and openings, including moonstone-shaped skylights, break up the building’s simple volume and engage it in an evocative relationship with its surroundings. Outdoor open-air showers cantilever from the house’s main volume.
As a safeguard to the ecology of the site, WORK partially positioned the new house on the footprint of an older structure. The couple performed extensive research into the house’s form to maximize solar exposure and ventilation, and eventually brought models to the site to gauge these relationships empirically. Rooms and openings face east and north, while circulation areas act as buffer zones along the southern edges. They called for local, ecologically conscious materials—natural stone as a heavy base, along with cedar that grows abundantly in the area. The firm’s design for the Moonstone House has been shelved, but WORK continues on other projects.
Formal name of project: Moonstone House
Location: Moonstone Beach, Rhode Island
Owner: Justin Morris and Tina Lutz
Gross Square Footage: 2,000 sq. ft.
Architect:
WORK Architecture Company (WORKac)
156 Ludlow Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10002
T: 212 228 1333
F: 212 228 1674
www.work.ac
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