In modern times, the house has been the go-to typology for architectural experimentation, whether framed by mid-century modernists as “case studies” or by late- or postmodern architects as “House (insert digit or letter here).” 5468796 Architecture’s Veil House is a contemporary case in point — if not exactly a “case study.” As 5468796 partner Sasa Radulovic puts it, “We have our preferences and interests, but we don’t want to be restricted by a design thesis when we take on a project like this. We really want to deal with the desires and needs of a human being, the client. So the design is based on a conversation that extends over two years or so. That’s what really generates the ideas that make each house specific and distinct.”
Radulovic resists relegating, even in retrospect, any of the firm’s work to a punctuation mark in the development of an architectural ideology. That said, this building engages not only strategies from the canon of modern residential architecture but also a more fundamental proposition about the house. It does satisfy specific desires; to suit a client too often in the public eye, privacy was prioritized from the outset. That need was realized in a multi-faceted, perforated steel shroud, a play of form and material that addresses the basic condition of any house: negotiating the tricky boundary between public face and private realm.
The starting point for the 500-square-metre home was an oft-deployed organizational strategy, the nine-square grid of the Palladian villa. Testing each square as first a solid, then a void, project architect and lead Ken Borton generated a spatial diagram out of juxtaposition and adjacency. Immaculately detailed partitions allow the surfaces of these cells to disappear before remanifesting; doors slide or swing into (and out of) place, and screens alternate between transparency and opacity.
The ground floor forms a kind of piano nobile, housing living, working and dining spaces. Bedrooms for the children (when they visit) nestle in the basement, ingeniously connected to the outdoors through slim double-height spaces. The abstract geometry and minimalist forms are softened by the use of stained and pre-weathered cedar (on vertical surfaces) and oak (on floors and ceilings), as well as the folded planes of the ceiling and the play of light from sources both natural and artificial (LEDs sequestered in the nooks and crannies of walls, ramp and stairs).
What makes this piano nobile especially unique is the space it is organized around: a small court open to the sky above. This is one of the fundamental gestures of the building, and it’s an intriguing choice. The courtyard house as a typology is often contrasted to the suburban house, the model behind so many North American homes. In some ways a precursor to that model, the Palladian villa tends to enclose its central space. In contrast, the atrium of this house gazes up to the sky. It’s an absence enriched and complicated by its relationship to the other gestures that organize the house: the ramp and the roof.
The homeowners hope to age in place here, so movement to the second, private floor is achieved via a gentle ramp. Its embrace of the ground-floor living, kitchen and dining spaces is another design aspect that helps turn the house into a home. But the ramp does much more than organize and humanize the interior. Its upper section also helps shape the remarkable roof: a surface draping up from the exterior, over the ramp and into the courtyard like a blanket.
Or like a veil. This is where the building engages with the fundamental role of the courtyard house: To cover the face of the building and shelter privacy within it, the veil — audaciously rendered in weathered steel — ripples in a complex series of interlocking fins placed in a running bond pattern and oriented to allow views from inside to up but not outside to in. Where slits in this lattice align, dapples of light are generated, and a kind of slow-motion moiré pattern moves across the interior as the day progresses.
Graphic play is characteristic of the work of 5468796, aligning it with the likes of Stan Allen, OMA and BIG. Here, the graphics become material in what we might see as a blanket of several plies — of weathered steel, of voids a The lattice coalesces into steel steps as it cascades into the central courtyard. In winter, these patinated stairs are capped with snow, to lovely effect.
The skill at dematerializing matter reaches its apogee in the front facade, which is rendered in scales — or pixels — of finely perforated steel. At the edges of the facade, these read as diaphanous, but toward the centre of the building, they are as opaque as a mask. Viewed from the empty centre of the house looking out to the street, the same material is nearly transparent, its small pierced panels conjuring halftones of blue sky.
“One reason for these forms,” says Radulovic of the cascading roof, “is to respond to the ‘Tudor style’ rooflines throughout this neighbourhood.” Houses in Tuxedo (one of Winnipeg’s poshest neighbourhoods; the name says it all) do generally fit within such conventions — large and ostentatious suburban specimens of pitched roofs and clumsy details. 5468796 has turned the suburban precedent on its head, dissolving Palladianism into something closer to the mashrabiya and jali screens of Arab and Indian architecture. Perhaps by downplaying the affectations of 20th-century research, 5468796 has achieved something more captivating and wondrous.
In Winnipeg, the Veil House by 5468796 Balances Privacy and Openness
With a shroud of Corten steel that also encloses a central courtyard, the Veil House by 5468796 is as practical as it is experimental.