Levels of Engagement: Part 3

At the end of what turned out to be the first part of this three-part post, I wondered how to downsize those access/street-threshold relationships Riken Yamamoto had embedded into his Pangyo Housing project. Part two made me think of voids and how they create a seemingly desirable physical and psychological separation between the outside with its distractions and an inner space for some form of work. In this third part I’m going to propose my re-worked scissor apartment plan as one way of downscaling those relationships. As you know, a scissor layout has an central access corridor (in orange) at one level (level 2.0 in the diagram on the left, below), and from there a person goes down half a level to the living room (on level 1.5). From the living room, one goes down another half a level, passing by the bathroom (at level 1.0) and on down another level to the bedroom or bedrooms (at level 1.0). From there, it is possible to go outside and down another half level to another corridor (at level 0.0) two floors below the starting one (at level 2.0). Units of this type are called downward units because, beginning with the living room, the rooms are progressively lower.

When this module is stacked as in the image on the right below, it becomes possible to go up half a level (from level 0.0) to the living room of the purple unit, and then up another half level and pass the bathroom (on level 1.0), up another half level to the bedrooms (on level 1.5) and out and up another half level to reach the other access corridor two floor up (at level 2.0). These units are called upwards units.

The advantage of the scissor layout is that all the living areas can be on the side which has either less noise and/or the better view while all bedrooms are on the other side. It’s egalitarian as long as you don’t use a wheelchair. Refer back to the Incremental Improvements post to see how all this worked in plan. Bathrooms were above or below the access corridors on the half-landings within the units. Risers were neat. The only problems was the internal bathrooms, the artificially ventilated kitchens, and the miserable Corbusian corridors.

Now. If we horizontally displace the living spaces from the corridor to make an approximately 2-metre wide lightwell either side, we suddenly have windows to everything and an open corridor. And. Because of the additional windows, we also have a more social arrangement where people in the living areas can see and be seen by people in the corridor, and vice-versa. Importantly all this seeing takes place across a void. Sounds like a plan.

And why is this good? The first advantage is that all rooms and the corridor that were previously internal can now have natural ventilation and a degree of natural illumination. The second and not so obvious advantage is that the two entrances can be used for different purposes. In the original scissor plan, the secondary entrance was indicated as a fire-escape exit – probably with good reason. These layouts may not be intuitive to firefighters but one of those entrances can be the workspace entrance and the other the household entrance. This is significant as people visiting the household don’t have to pass through the workspace as they would have had to in a Japanese machiya or even Riken Yamamoto’s SOHO units where the living space is entered via the small office space in both the Jian Lai SOHO and the Canal Court Codan projects.

Another thing is, how else are you going to have two entrances to a continuous space? You could always walk across the corridor to your shop or workspace on the other side but the problem is how to live and work in the same space/s. Similarly, one could always have a very long corridor with separate entrances to the workspace and the living space but this would force either longer corridors in a slab building or two or four units in a tower building even if there are large vertical voids through the building to avoid windows opening directly onto the corridor/elevator lobby. That corridor would be dark unless, as at Canal Court Codan, units were removed to illuminate them, or unless a corridor (going nowhere) extended across the tower, as at Jian Wai SOHO.

Another possibility is to do a Unité and have entrances to residential space and to workspace on opposite sides of the corridor and have them connected by a floor above or below, double-height voids optional. This doesn’t seem as if it would be anywhere near as efficient. True, there is level access (still requiring a level access bathroom both ends if we’re going to be serious) but there are now two full flights of stairs inside.

NERDY BIT: How to stack another similar unit in the same width might not be impossible if the second floor of one unit passed under the corridor and that of the other one passed over but my gut feeling is that the total unit area would have to be significantly larger to make it work. Doing this would mean that the voids separating the windows from the access corridor only serve to create more less-useable space upstairs/downstairs. This wouldn’t be the case if the voids were as wide as a full flight of stairs is long but there’d still be a net waste of the volume above and below those stairs. This doesn’t happen in what I’m proposing as external and internal stairs are alternately stacked. Like this. There’s no wasted headroom, at least not on floors that aren’t the lowest or highest.

In the proposal, having separate entrances for living space and workspace means the workspace entrances can be indicated by signs, advertising or by a “shopfront”. In the image below, the low horizontal windows were intended as over-the-counter kitchen windows but there’s no reason. The window and second/ary entrance to the bedroom area can be seen in the image on the right

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There’s no reason why the kitchen windows can’t be a kitchen window like that of Riken Yamamoto’s Dragon Lily House. Or any other type of window.

And there’s no reason the workspace window has to be the indicative one I’ve shown for the bedroom. There could be two desks beneath a strip window, a wall of glass blocks with openable panels, a full sheet of glass – anything that projects an image identifiable to passers-by. The choice of wall and window facing the access corridor becomes a commercial decision, as does any signage and advertising. An ideal corridor would appear as not exactly a shopping mall, and not exactly a street either, but definitely less of a corridor now that every door is either a workspace or a living space. There aren’t any fixed ways for workspaces or residences to present themselves. Either way, the walls facing the corridor are signs.

Internally, either way, the space is freely allocatable and divisible. In fact, there’s no reason why the bedroom area has to be the workspace. Since both spaces have an entrance, the kitchen can be in the workspace and a sofa or whatever in the bedroom space. The only thing that can’t be changed is the position of the bathroom on the landing inbetween. Spatially as well as temporally, people will find their work-life balance at different points. Here’s two possible ways that aren’t necessarily opposites or even extremes. When we see the first image below, we see an office decor but the presence of food makes us imagine a household kitchen not too far away. With the second image, we note the uncluttered interior and see the kitchen as a standard fixture in an office. In the end, it doesn’t matter. People can live and work however they like. They get to decide where the work area is, how to access it, and what its relationship with the living space is going to be.

All units in this next diagram are upwards-going units. The downwards-going ones have their entrance stairs – the double width ones – above and below the the internal stairs of the upwards-going ones. In a nutshell, the two entrances link to two spaces that can be used however. Being wet areas, it’s better if all kitchens stay on the one side. The position of the bathroom can’t change. Any change in length lengthens the entire building. Any change in their width lengthens the half landings inside the units and, accordingly, the width of the building.

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Incremental Improvements

Machine for Living Many