Concord House

View of courtyard.

Words from the Architects

Densely wooded and characterized by a difficult topography, the thirteen-acre site in Concord, Massachusetts overlooks a private pond and offered few alternative locations for a large building. As a result, privacy and vistas governed the siting. The clients' extensive program described rooms, ways of using spaces, material qualities, stylistic expectations, concerns for neighbors' perceptions, as well as a fixed construction budget and schedule.

Slate wall detail.

The design effort focused on orchestrating a montage of elements in an unprecedented manner, aiming to produce an original whole. The resulting building consists of several components: a strongly figural courtyard; an "L" shaped house that partially surrounds the courtyard (and is itself composed of the courtyard wall and the body of the house); and a triad of ancillary volumes annexed to the outer perimeter of the main volume.

View of courtyard.

The strategy of montage enabled a design flexibility responding to the complexity of the problem: the building is composed rigorously, but also sympathetically with the local New England residential architecture and the clients' need for a home. Whereas the courtyard wall employs traditional double-hung windows, stone walls, and wood siding, the body of the house is composed on an a-b-a-b classical grid, that partitions space according to functional needs. The body is wrapped with a vernacular wall surface (wood clapboard, painted white), on which fenestration patterns precisely register the rhythms and hierarchies of the plans.

The three ancillary volumes function as follows: a formal salon is used occasionally, the domestic breakfast room daily, and the rustic screen porch seasonally. Understood as a "house" rather than "a house as work of art," the building permits its users personal iconographic outbursts, without suggesting a totalizing aesthetic. The project's realism makes it widely intelligible rather than abstract or artistic - in essence, a building whose artistry is made architectural, while acknowledging the many circumstances that shaped it.

Credits

• Text by Machado and Silvetti Associates
• Photographs by © Peter Aaron/Esto, Courtesy of Machado and Silvetti Associates

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