Boston | 2021
Switchback House occupies a 15’ wide, four-story single family historic lot in Boston’s South End — an exceptionally narrow footprint. As rooms are sized and placed, they jostle for primacy, resisting and breaking the vertical shaft of the stairway.
The hairpin turn of a mountain road becomes a a conceptual and organizational device to address these conflicts. The hairpin is a contingent figure that reacts dynamically to its contextual constraints. Unlike the stacking switchback stair, a hairpin stair can strategically lengthen or shorten its coils to adapt to shifting program and circulation needs, producing an unorthodox flexibility and efficiency.
The familiar winder stair is un-wound, allowing for the stair to migrate diagonally through the house while also increasing usable square footage by 20%. As this un-wound stair cascades obliquely through the four-story brownstone, it carves out a connective atrium within which this misbehaving element continuously reconfigures itself — from straight treads to winders, from solid to open balusters and back again — producing a sculptural figure and soaring space within an impossibly constrained site.
Designed in collaboration with Figure Office
Contractor: Evergreen GCI