Inside-Out Houses

Inside-Out Houses is situated adjacent to the future home of the Jane Adams Hull House National Public Housing Museum in Little Italy, Chicago. Inside-Out Houses arrays the worker’s cottage on the site in reference to a generic suburban cul-du-sac composition. By using the worker’s cottage as the type, placed next to a former public housing, and now arranged as a new urban-suburbanism, Inside-Out Houses looks to combine, merge, reconcile this site as a celebration of several housing typologies and characteristics.

The Studio used Fumihiko Maki’s 1960 writing, Investigations on Collective Form as a basis for analysis. Maki concludes his text with an outline for four ingredients to achieve GroupForm. Inside-Out Houses reinterprets this recipes as follows:

Link - the approach to the spaces, and the project’s treatment of the fifth elevation (ground). The project unrolls the Chicago worker’s cottage and recasts the form as the groundscape. The unrolled cottage is multiplied by five and scaled at varying percentages.

Repeat - the multiplication of the part to make up the whole. The site includes five cottage houses with volumetric rotations at 5, 25, 50, 75 and 100%. This repetition shows the procedural rotation to the final form, while each cottage offers a different interior experience.

Define - the project’s legibility aerially, how the orientation of the parts combine to produce spaces of public and private. Each cottage’s placement upon the pathway is intentionally rotated so entrances don’t become redundant. In section and elevation the GroupForm condenses and expands, allowing for a collective reading at times and an individual reading in others.

Mediate - the negotiation between the project and the surroundings, and the transfer between public and private. The overlaps of the cottages to the binding pathway transform the cottage into an exterior porch that becomes as a buffer between purely interior (private), and exterior (public). The porches act as an organizational tool, facilitating not only use but also entry- orientating the visitor through another characteristic of the residential home.

Fall 2019