Iwan Baan, Naho Kubota

OBJETIVO

A main objective of the project is to maximize interior daylighting, conventionally a challenge in this housing typology. Additionally, another key ambition is to utilize the constraints of the site to create an unconventional domestic organization. While the exterior volume is mostly dictated by zoning regulations, the project was approached with few other preconceptions.

Windows are only allowed facing the front and rear, so those elevations consist of large format glass, detailed flush to adjacent black stucco, maximizing light to the inside. Aside from two lateral walls, the house is characterized by an absence of interior walls, rooms, and corridors. The openness—exactly 11 foot clear inside—enables daylight penetration throughout, but also an unusual lack of separation between uses. In lieu of walls, the split-level section creates spatial distinctions between different domestic functions. The vertical void inside the central, perforated steel staircase becomes a lightwell, further introducing daylight towards the middle of the plan.

The structural design enables the open interior. Lateral, load-bearing walls consist of reinforced concrete masonry units (CMU), and floors are composite concrete and corrugated metal deck. Based on the lot width, the clear span of floors is close to the maximum unsupported limit of the composite deck. Floors throughout are topped with a poured polyurethane finish, and the structure is exposed on the ceilings. Without interior shear walls, the building is braced at the front and rear façade for lateral stability. Three diagonal steel braces are also exposed behind the front façade.

CONTEXTO

Located in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, the Narrow House is situated on an atypical New York City lot measuring 13’-4” wide by 100’ deep, which is slenderer than the normative 25-foot-wide zoning lot. Despite its non-conformity, the site met other specific criteria which enabled development of the vacant lot. Since 1961, the Zoning Resolution has generally prohibited new residential buildings on lots less than 18 feet in width.

Although rapidly transforming, the neighborhood is characterized by a number of vacant lots that were an outcome of so-called urban renewal, including this site. In parallel to this project, the architect has been researching residual, vacant, and irregular lots throughout New York City. A 2017 exhibition by Only If at the Shenzhen Biennale identified and cataloged 3,600 such lots, 600 of which were owned by the city. Only If was also a winner of the 2019 open international competition organized by the AIA New York and NYC Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) to develop 23 city-owned vacant, irregular lots, including an identical, vacant lot directly adjacent to this one. The Narrow House represents a specific architectural proposition but is also a prototype for infill and a polemic on the greater potential for architectural invention in constrained residual urban spaces.

The project was self-initiated, developed, and is occupied by the architects themselves, who acquired the undervalued land in 2015. In this sense, the project also seeks a model of architectural agency, beyond the client-architect service model, to produce experimental forms of housing.