Hairpin House

Hairpin House looks to the undulations of a hairpin turning mountain road as organizational and spatial device within a constrained 19th century domestic interior.

Situated within a formerly working class neighborhood and measuring only fifteen feet in interior width, the rowhouse was characterized by a barbell plan with the interior third occupied entirely with vertical circulation, leading to a condition of all rooms being identically sized. In order to overcome this programmatic constraint, the stair was reconceived as a malleable topography, unspooled and draped across a newly optimized programmatic stack of varying dimensions.

As the hairpin stair cascades obliquely through the four-story rowhouse, it carves out a connective forty foot 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 vertiginous space within a highly constrained site