Making the immeasurable measurable.
Planning for a family’s divergent need can be complicated. With three children in their early 20’s, there was a long list of programmatic needs to take into account. Meshing those needs with a tight building envelope and protected views to the North seemed like it could be a challenge.
The day that we began discussing the program we were also speaking with an extended family member, a student at the University of Pennsylvania. The conversation brought to mind Louis Kahn, who spent so many years teaching there, when he said, “A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and, in the end, must be unmeasurable.” How could we simplify the divergent needs and make them measurable?
Again, Kahn came to mind: “Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.” Further, we thought of a Venn diagram with parents in one circle and the grown children in the other. We separated the diagram into three component parts, three horizontal columns. The East column would be for the parents. The West column would be for the three children. The center column would be the overlap, where they come together.