Posted Jan 19, 2016, 5:22 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
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The Offset House - Is This the Suburban House 2.0?
Is This the Suburban House 2.0?
January 19th, 2016
By ZACH MORTICE
Read More: http://www.citylab.com/design/2016/0...use-20/424473/
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It’s called the Offset House, and it’s by the Sydney-based studio otherothers. It started with Australia’s bizarre status as one of the most urbanized nations on Earth that is nevertheless still one of the least dense. Between those two poles, suburbia is the rule and reality.
- Take a puffy, Neo-Whatever McMansion, and strip away its thin veneer of brick and pattern-book pediment. Leave the wooden stick framing intact. Now you’ve got a veranda shorn of historical design tropes in favor of structural expression, authentic materials, and pleasing rhythms of post and beam. --- The proposal flouts consumerist tendencies with a quick, focused act of self-abnegation, great for hammocks, barbecues, parties, and other ways to enjoy Sydney’s (or Florida’s) climate.
- There are aesthetic and cultural reasons to pull back the borders of hokey cornices and columns and create semi-public space in landscapes that are often punishingly privatized. But the Offset House also rests on an economic supposition about what people want from their houses. --- At a time when Australian banks are refusing to lend for greenfield developments, bloated houses are declining in price, and urban apartments and utility costs are skyrocketing, the Offset House can offer suburbanites trapped in massive energy hogs a financial escape hatch.
- By making a section of their home an outdoor veranda, and shrinking the climate-controlled footprint of it, they would downsize the Australian (or American) Dream—but also their utility payments. Uniting suburban populism with design-nerd aspirations, the Offset House identifies why there’s so much confusion and mistrust between designers and the suburban communities they mostly don’t work for.
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