2021
Adapting the visual and geometric language of Basquiat’s crown, peaks are arranged in symmetrical or serial arrangements to oscillate between the sawtooth and the gable, between the iconic and the familiar, and between domestic and work typologies. The house applies these binary silhouettes to its various elevations and allows for a nonbinary extrusion of space toward the interior that accommodates multiple subjectivities and uses, confounding normative expectations of each.
The rooms are domestic in plan but overscaled in section, allowing opportunities for repartitioning and adaptive transformation over time. Domestic types of the triple decker and shotgun house each expanded access to home ownership by increasing density and reconceiving the physical and social envelope of the nuclear family, but fail to engage live/work needs of the present moment. Crown House, through its reconfigurable cellular plan and individual access to each bedroom, is mutably fluid between single family, multi-family, live/ work, and non-traditional social structures, variably containing a diversity of domestic arrangements within an identical envelope, and updating the ‘missing middle’ of American domestic types.
Designed in collaboration with Sean Canty