{Metaphysical House}
A house extension proposal treading in between translations from medium to medium.
This house extension began with an inquiry into Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum and it’s occupation of the corner of Madison and 75th in New York City. In 1989, Michael Graves, Renzo Piano, and Rem Koolhaas respectively proposed additions to the then Whitney Museum, but the building was designed to avoid relationships with surrounding buildings. It holds its context at arms length, prompting the 1989 New York Times headline: “The Whitney Paradox: To Add Is To Subtract.” This project revisits the Whitney paradox, but rather attempts to create a sibling for a house in Silverlake that remarkably resembles Breuer’s Whitney Museum.
My interpretation of these relationships is that each building is a translation of its predecessor: A museum, followed by a museum translated into a house, followed by a museum translated into a house translated into an architectural model of a house extension. I was interested in how each translation changed the resulting artefacts so I continued translating within each piece of representation using techniques like bitmapping and custom pattern generation.
