Jared Langevin shared with us his project Cross Cultivation. The project, designed along with Joshua Cummings and Gabriel Cuéllar was awarded 2nd place in the 2010 USGBC New York Natural Talent Design Competition (Emerging Professionals category). More images and architect’s description after the break.
Domestic architecture is capable of engendering one’s sense of belonging to networks of humans and nature, fostering a distinctly personal place for its inhabitants by strengthening their relationship to surrounding people, places, and climates. A relationship on any number of social, emotional, and sensory levels is evident in a gathering of neighbors around a crowded dinner table, a conversation between loved ones in the dappled evening light of a veranda, or a solitary afternoon of reading amongst the pleasant scents of a fragrant garden. In each case, the quality of the connective experience is inseparable from the character of the domestic space in which it occurs; architecture is the moderator between the individual and the collective, between private and public, between the cultivated growth of the exterior and the conserved consistency of the interior.
Prevailing practice in contemporary domestic architecture has shifted architecture’s dynamic capability for moderation towards an unnatural condition of separation. As technological advances enable the more efficient creation and control of an artificial interior environment, they do so at the expense of the relationships that once existed between an inhabitant’s “indoor” and “outdoor” existences.
