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2-Way House

Location
San Francisco, California

Date 2002

Description
This house was designed for a site on the south side of Bernal Hill in San Francisco. As the site is positioned just below the crest of a hill that hovers above South San Francisco, the building straddles two very different spatial scales: that of the narrow street and densely arranged houses on the upside, and expansive views over the tops of buildings towards the Bay and cityscape on the down-side.  For this reason, the 2-Way House can be seen as a threshold across which these two scales merge, and the architecture has been conceived with the aim to frame and amplify different aspects of this intersection

By maintaining a clear distinction between the structural assembly on the outside, and the more homogenized surfaces of the inside, the 2-Way frames something of the traditional dichotomy by which interior and exterior have been distinguished by codes of materiality, construction and patterns of inhabitation. In this case, the structure is apparent on the exterior, while inside the scale of interiority is transgressed through the diminishment of material difference and extended views of the city beyond.