Michael Bell Architecture
Blue House ι St. Mary's County ι Tidewater Maryland 1987 ι It is, in effect, a continuous surface that folds in on itself like a Mobius strip. . . .
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Michael Bell Architecture
Blue House ι St. Mary's County ι Tidewater Maryland 1987 ι It is, in effect, a continuous surface that folds in on itself like a Mobius strip. . . .
The Blue House was designed to occupy two acres at the junction of the Potomac and St. Mary’s rivers in historic St. Mary’s County, Maryland. Access to the house requires visitors to traverse a five hundred acre farm before reaching the river’s edge. The design of this small twelve-hundred-square-foot house was driven by two major concerns, each of which corresponded to issues of theory and design that were ascendant in the late 1980s. The first was an inquiry into architectural typology; the Blue House was derived from a transformation of historically significant regional plans and details. The second was an inquiry into emergent ideas of architectural space in relation to topology. (These same themes form the basis of “Having Heard Mathematics, The Topologies of Boxing,” presented later in this book.) The goal was to produce a house that was regionally and historically based, but also contemporary in its spatial inquiry.
The Blue House is organized around a central oculus, and a sleeve- or tube-shaped hallway connects the two major components of the structure. It is, in effect, a continuous surface that folds in on itself like a Mobius strip. The spatial continuity was intended to question the place of the inhabitant amid architectural histories, and the house was organized by function to abet this reading of space. Living spaces are in the main two-story volume, and the thirty-five-foot-long horizontal band of the cruciform forms the bedroom. The two volumes of the bathrooms mimic the twin chimneys typical in the region. Permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Many of the Blue House’s details are derived from local typologies in the historic tidewater region of the Chesapeake Bay. The facade is a version of Chinese Chippendale, a term used to describe the ornamental rails common in the area (left, third from top), which are said to have been fabricated by a talented woodworker who escaped from prison. The facade’s diagonal patterns were extrapolated to serve as a pictorial device that recalls Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings.
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