This first semester Harvard GSD studio project proposes that the relationship between a building and its site need not be a one-way function - instead, the architectural intervention here physically alters the ground as much as the site influences the building.
We were asked to imagine the insertion of a third house (with a living area, working area and a sleeping area) between two existing typical residences in Cambridge, MA - but this space is too small for the new program. To accomodate it, the two original houses and the ground they sit on are allowed to shift in plan and section to an extent that the new house can fit in. The tenuous position of the shifted houses is locked into position by the dovetail geometry of the insertion - the three houses and their sites are now bound together into a single composition. What were two houses with a leftover space between them become a single tripartite composition. Instead of considering the site merely ground on which to build, the Lodged House shows that the relationship between building and site can be reciprocal and recursive with unexpected results.
As a project bound up in the imagination of vernacular houses plowing through the earth, restraint is necessary to prevent the site alteration from becoming a full-on landslide. The proposal here seeks only to shift the ground exactly by the amount necessary to allow it to lodge it in place - no more and no less. The specific form of the Lodged House both distinguishes it from the original houses and allows the originals to have the same access to light that their existing windows have by opening up courtyards at those locations, which shift from left to right. Internally, the three sections of the Lodged House remain distinct.
