Y-Wing

Due to global patterns of life, contemporary culture fosters new “families” that are not longer defined only by strict racial, typological or economic categories, but cross and flex as subsequent generations increasingly embrace interracial marriage, unmarried or non-reproductive couples, divorce, secularism, single parent households, roommates, co-habitating multi-generational families, adoption, etc.  This multiplicity has the potential to create rich iterations and personal identity within common experience that requires a more variable relationship between time and space; thus, ownership, interior and exterior relationships, and living boundaries must become more flexible.

Y-Wing Housing:  The Y-Wing is less a specific architecture and more a system of spatial territories. The variability of the system works at two scales:  the system components that allow for an infinitely expandable spatial envelop (it can infinitely extend by adding new wing that adapt to landscape: embed, rise, or fall; curl, hook or elongate) and the wall-less permeable skin system that allows for a gradation of interior and exterior: audial, visual, illumination, and air flow.  The skin is not an enclosure system, it is a delineated spine of infrastructure from which water, energy, and materials flow.

Expandable System: The Y-Wing does not preference a specific form, technology, or material, but instead suggests a variable individual unit that connects with other around it to create either larger units for expanding families or extended spaces for necessary use.  The system itself also extends arms into the landscape that ride along side or conflate to create courtyard spaces and appropriate the landscape into the system of the house.  Through stacking and conjoined configurations, it can figure into single-family housing, apartments, or row houses.

Permeable System: The structural and programmatic lines, defined dimensionally by the modular, designate the elevation, infrastructure, variable program, and the changing relationship between inside and outside.  Program is enhanced by specific spatial relationships and infrastructure availability, not defined by the architect.  Openings allow for connection physically back into the landscape as well as views– the elongated linearity drawing the inhabitant out into the landscape– the new fenêtre longeur.   Here we are allowed to enter the exterior and interior at will, not as a transition, but as seamless neutral passage. Space is also captured in between the volumes that are covered but not interior, cultivated, but not controlled.