House For A Love Lost Couple

Edward Hopper's artwork 'Room in New York' depicts a couple who suffer from the boredom of domestic married life. The man neglects his wife as he reads his paper, to tired to interact after a day of work. The wife idly plays on the piano, suffocated by the world she is in. My house is designed to rectify this. Its design is based around what I perceive as the three key romantic elements- food, rest and bathing.


Inspiration for the design came from a number of sources. Whist on the exterior, the building appears simple and cubic, the interior is an exploration of the interelation of space. The design has a strong affinity with water as it is the source of life and has the ability to cleanse. The artwork has the couple situated in the urban jungle, but for true romance to occur these two lovers most be brought back to nature. As such my design is somewhat similar to a cave, where the entry of light is highly regulated and incredibly striking.


Le Corbusiers Ronchamp was a source of inspiration for my windows, which use an irregular pattern of size and order to create a unique approach to the way light is introduced to a room.



My original model was to be cast from concrete. Unfortunately this did not turn out to well, with the building crumbling as I removed the mold. This allowed me though to create another sectional model that better portrayed how the spaces fitted together. Whilst also leaving me with a monolithic ruin that portrayed the sense of weight of my building and its thickness.


Each of the rooms is dedicated to a specific function. The entry contains an inbuilt seat and table where our lovers can share an intimate meal looking out over their internalised world. Across a small bridge there is a bedroom, whose roof slopes down towards the sunken bed. Here the act of reading can be intimate, an activity shared. Who knows where else this may lead. Then from each of these rooms there is a staircase. One for the man and one for the woman. Descended these stairs they each arrive at narrow corridor that leads into the baths, which occupy the entire bottom floor. As they move along this corridor which seperates them from the rest of the room by a wooden screen, they undress. Emerging naked from each of their corridors, they are now ready to bathe and to be clensed. Entering the water the two lovers can come together and share in this moment.It is here that they are offered their only relation with the exterior world. The pool they are in extends itself outside the building where the two lovers can sit together on a small ledge and look out towards nature.




Much like the cave, the center of the pool s bathed in light. Looking up the buildings form the walls of the cavern with a large opening looking out onto the heavens. When it rains, the building is like a series of caves sheltered by the cliff as water runs off the roof and down into the pool. It is times like this when water runs over the spout forming a waterfall into the water below that our lovers can snuggle up together and look out onto their world.