Hairpin House

Residential

Boston, MA

2022

Hairpin House looks to the undulations of a hairpin turning mountain road as navigational and spatial device within a constrained 19th century domestic interior.

Fig. 1

Hairpin turning road

Fig. 2

Front facade

Situated within a formerly working class neighborhood and measuring only fifteen feet in interior width, the rowhouse was characterized by a barbell plan with the interior third occupied entirely with circulation, leading to a condition of all rooms being identically sized. The renovation allowed programs to swell and shrink to their desired dimensions, causing programmatic volumes to abuse the stair to the point of rupture. In response, the stair was unspooled and draped across the new programmatic topography

Fig. 3

Section

Fig. 4

Stair Plan

Fig. 5

Overhead view of stair atrium

The stair is reimagined as a contingent figure that reacts dynamically to its contextual constraints. As it cascades obliquely through the four-story rowhouse, it carves out a connective forty foot atrium within which this misbehaving element continuously reconfigures itself, producing a sculptural figure and vertiginous space within a highly constrained site.