impluvium – frame

elevating a courtyard

2017⋅03⋅03 NS Coleman1 Comment

A week or so ago I promised elevations for a courtyard plan. Well, here they be. The front and back feature vernacular porches, complete with columns and hip roofs. The sides, however belie the modernist floor plan inside, with floor-to-ceiling Mies-ian windows at the dining room and bedroom (what’s privacy?), and counter-height butt-glazed windows at the kitchen. The roof forms cannot be seen from the exterior, as they all slope inward to the impluvium-like courtyard. I really aught to do some sections. . .

kahn, mies, and an impluvium

2017⋅01⋅302017⋅01⋅30 NS ColemanLeave a comment

Today’s post is super simple: square house with notched out corners and a circular impluvium in the center. Hints of Louis I. Kahn’s Goldenberg Residence prevail, set against Mies-ian open planning.

a pool house

2016⋅08⋅192016⋅08⋅19 NS ColemanLeave a comment

A square with brick exterior walls, with a square pool in the center. One half of the enclosure is fleshed out on the interior with modern details, while the other has a classical impluvium roof, but with the same sliding glass doors as the modern half. An unfolded wormseye (upview) axonometric is below.

another round court

2016⋅07⋅122016⋅07⋅12 NS Coleman2 Comments

Yesterday’s circular courtyard influenced this take, along with a small fountain I passed by in Beverly Hills the other day. Six columns make up a circular courtyard, filled with a pool and floating obelisk, while one side of the circular entablature rises to a pediment on one side, hidden from the entry tunnel. The focus is obviously interior, but that doesn’t mean that the exterior is devoid of a little fun and asymmetry. A wormseye axonometric above, sections and floor plan below, elevations and roof plan beneath.

yet another basilica

2016⋅07⋅05 NS ColemanLeave a comment

O. M. Ungers and Richard Meier play the primary instigators in terms of language of this basilica – minus the Doric impluvium entry courtyard, of course. The front elevation/plan drawing shows shadows that hint at both wormseye and oblique axonometric projections. Structure and tectonics play a central role where pipe and wide flange columns slide back and forth next to one another, while small circular side chapels cut into the deep poche of the stone walls.

a mountain-side courtyard home

2016⋅06⋅14 NS ColemanLeave a comment

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This house is a line of three squares: a central tree-filled courtyard flanked by a garage/studio impluvium volume on one end, and a large, hip-roofed residence on the other. The rafters of this roof extend to encapsulate a long porch, the majority of which is screened. A spiral staircase descends to the bedrooms, which are located below. The complex is imagined to be sited on a hillside, with the garage square nearly underground, and the residence looking out over the valley below.

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impluvium house

2016⋅05⋅092016⋅05⋅09 NS ColemanLeave a comment

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I’ve been fascinated with the impluvium for some time now – a large roughly cubic room with an inverted roof that is open to the sky at the center, an essential feature of the Roman domus house typology. This project places a large impluvium at its center, with modern courtyards and bedrooms flaking it, and more traditionally-scaled living spaces at the entry. Formal echoes of Irving Gill, H. H. Richardson, Richard Neutra, and Michael Graves abound.

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