sdv.01

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strip : scan over stripped down villa surface treatment

strip : spin

sdv.01 - Stripped-Down Villa : Micro-Estate - S*D*V . 01

Jason Vigneri-Beane <jcvb@splitstudio.com>

Project Statement

Stripped-Down Villas : Micro-Estates (S*D*V) are part of an on-going project thatcompact selected aspects of luxuriant living conditions down to a formulation of MICRO-ESTATES.

A few of ways in which normative architecture seems not to be able to come astride with developments in the contemporary world are scale (size), mobility and intelligence. While competition over space increases in relation to population growth measured against available real estate, normative (residential) architecture continues to become increasingly larger. While other disciplines and industries have been developing techniques of miniaturization architecture has been participating in the production of wasteful enlargement on a number of fronts, from material use to environmental conditioning. One could almost say that size equals both present and future waste. It may not be a stretch to say that size is in a feedback-relationship with (lack of) mobility. While normative architecture is obviously and understandably involved in the production of fixed objects on fixed grounds there is something to learn from the range of alternative architectural lessons demonstrated by informal settlements, trailer parks, displaced populations and societies organized by collective intelligence. In these conditions, the question of a fixed relationship between living space and property is in play and, although complex, strategic and finely-tuned, also minimal. What is important to note here is that the combination of object-location relationships and the evolution of an object in relation to the specificities of how it must perform in its non-normative state leads, in a sense, to an adaptive intelligence that is specific to site and program without being fixed to them. This special formulation of specificity without fixity shows in a kind of non-optimized efficiency wherein architectural identities and the operations out of which they emerge are clarified, distilled and compacted without genericizing normalization. This interest in compacted architectural operations and constrained identity form the basic framework within which both Stripped-Down Shelters and Stripped-Down Villas / Micro-Estates are developed.

SDV.01 --- SDV.01 distills a relationship among the living space, the grounds of the (micro) estate, the wings of the villa, the courtyard and the surface treatment until they are integrated into a single adapted envelop that, while foundationless, sponsors an interior volume and the definition of an in-board site. Rather than resolving these relationships synthetically and arriving at the normalization, the object aspires to the ways in which animal morphology develops in extreme conditions where, simply put, certain features become exaggerated and others begin to disappear, become obsolete, transform, and become rudimented.