House In A Garden

House In A Garden is a single-family urban infill project nestled into the Historic Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami, Florida.

The program is arranged throughout the tight urban lot intermixing the interior spaces with an assortment of exterior gardens. Entering the site, visitors move along a linear garden, sliding under the meandering wood roof plane and arriving at the inner garden court. The inner court is shaped by a large circular cut through the roof plane, opening the space to the sky. The program of the house wraps the inner court offering access to views into the gardens and the dappled light filter by the surrounding tree canopy. In addition to daylighting, the court opens to allow passive ventilation from the south pavilion to the north living bars.

Reinforcing the strategies inherent to courtyard typology, the interior spaces are thin in nature favoring connectivity to the surrounding gardens and taking advantage of view sheds reaching into, through, and out into the site. The large meandering wood roof offers varying degrees of overhangs that shape space and light. At the inner court, the roof is shaped around a native avocado tree; the landscape is composed of a number of fruit-bearing trees and edible plants that provide fresh ingredients and create a dappled light. Gardens slip between, along, and around the residences layer spaces, connecting the public living pavilion to the streetscape, and establishing a degree of vegetative privacy within the dense urban setting of Miami. Additionally, the perforated aluminum behaves like a large parasol, keeping the intense South Florida sun from heating up the building envelope greatly reducing the thermal load of the structure. The form of the building, coupled with the simple yet effective construction assemblies work together to reduce operational energy consumption while the CLT walls and roof act as a carbon sink helping to mitigate the implications of the carbon intensive processes associated with construction.

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