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Dr. House
 

2012 // New York City, NY, US // preservation hypothesis // study

  Overview  

 

 

“...like the philosopher Jagger once said, ‘You can’t always get what you want.’” We know what he wants… and that is more powerful than what we can… so we do it!


The project concept arises from his programmatic desires expelled outwards into the city while transforming both the city and the building. Only through eccentricity, selfishness and a megalomaniac vision of a genius mind, global magical happenings could have taken place in our urban cultures. The vision-projected of a prodigious character always entails a radical transformation in a more global realm. Dr House needs a place to sleep, to drink, to read, his personal storage. Those spaces are not gathered; they are dispersed along existing building products and urban contexts. Each piece is attached to other buildings. In that sense, Dr House’s reading room is attached to the New York Fiction center. It is a semi public, semi-private space that is domestically equipped by providing to the inhabitant more than bookshelves, a personal storage. This storage and its updates could be also the Library’s mobile archive. 

His house is a trip. All of his belongings are scattered over New York states and even further. His home is a continuous travel process. His space is a search space. His workspace, his leisure, his archive are distributed over different space-zones. The city doesn’t end when Dr House reaches his home, shuts his door. He has to walk (or fly) around the city to feel like at home. His house is a diagram that evolves on the axis of time. By domesticating the trip he may come up with a house that he never exits. The city is the endless interior of his home. His house is an aggregation of objects, machines, documents and surfaces that revolve around his body; his house is a mold for everydayness. It generates geography of habits, customs and repetitive actions. All of these construct the certainty of his daily life; the routine. The design process of our hypothesis is precise, almost mathematical. The Flatiron volume is dismantled into smaller ones according to the different programmatic typologies. The proportion of each fragment matters; it is determined according to the spatial needs of each typology. The hypothesis diagrams Dr House’s personal corporeal, psychological occurrences and periodical encounters:  cartography of the statistical portrait of his life. The proposal deals with the fragmentation of the flatiron volume. The monument is cut in pieces and then dispersed around the city. The monument is everywhere; on top of existing buildings keeping a level of independency, attached on their sides as a parasite sucking their content or even traveling along the Hudson River like Aldo Rossi’s floating abstractions.

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