MC38 Residence

Substance Architecture

Recognitions: 2019 AIA Iowa Design Award

Project Description

This 2,800 square foot home on the northern face of Twin Peaks in San Francisco was built in the 1950’s and designed by celebrated Frank Lloyd Wright associate, Aaron Green. The house had a formal underpinning and a strong organizational logic, but it had fallen victim to decades of piecemeal renovations that obfuscated this original rigor. For the renovation, the designers researched the original drawings to understand the generative concepts and worked to reinterpret these ideas to create a 21st century home. The house was organized with the “public” spaces on the upper, entry level, reserving the lower level for “private” bedroom spaces. Each floor is developed with service spaces toward the southern, street side of the home, providing panoramic views to the served spaces to the north. The home’s massing implied a spatial division as well. The eastern and western flat-roofed portions of the home were separated by a gabled central hall that runs its length north to south – from the entry to a projected bay at the north. The design team worked to reinterpret and clarify these strategies in the renovation. The sixty-year accretion of finishes was stripped from both levels, and a very limited palate of materials was carefully deployed to unify the home’s spaces and reinforce the clarity of its organization. The renovation removes decades of piecemeal remodeling efforts to reveal the home’s original logic – and then clarifies and extends that logic through contemporary means to create a home that is authentically of our time.