Type:
Private Residential, Passivhaus Standard

Location:
Kerhonkson, NY

Status:
In Construction

Team:
MDB, Firetower Engineering, Baukraft Engineering

Date:
2021-2023

Role:
Sole Designer


Barn House sits at the head of an old grazing meadow. It describes and resolves three formative tensions.

Firstly, it acknowledges the client’s conflicting programmatic desires: on the one hand for an intimate dwelling and on the other for a container that can host their extended family.

Secondly, the building takes seriously the formal and structural relationships between the gable, the eave, and the porch.

Thirdly, it balances a high-performance energy efficiency requirement with an openness to the site.

The house therefore contains two worlds: an open plan ground floor which the client can occupy in solitude, and an extended dormitory under the pitched roof. Rather than connecting these two floors, the stairs express and exacerbate their difference.

While the porch is typically understood, formally and structurally, as an addition, Barn House thinks of the porch as the eave’s negative space; this requires a balancing act with the visual and structural stability of the building’s gable ends, and produces a surprising variety of sections.

Passive house construction standards require a super-insulated, air-tight building with windows optimized to control solar gains. But the Barn House also wants to open to the uninterupted visual and physical experience of the meadow. The depth of the porches and the size and position of the windows is carefully calibrated to achieve both these ends.




01. approach


02. covered entrance


03. kitchen


04. dining


05. stairwell


06. stairway

07. stair detail


08. stair landing


09. upper hall

10. under construction

11. under construction


01. site plan


02. porch concept collage



03. massing axon


04. barnhouse genealogy
05. level 1 plan

06. level 2 plan

07. east elevation
08. east section aa
09. east section bb10. east section cc
11. east section dd 12. east section ee

13. south section
14. north section

15. typical wall section


16. energy modelling + comfort analysis


17. stair construction logic