Gold Architecture, Building and Structure Design · 2020
Bienville House Duplex
by Nathan Fell
- A' Design Award 2020 Gold Winner in Architecture, Building and Structure Design
- Awarded April 15, 2020
- CLIENT: Nathan Fell Architecture
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 35,252
- Verification code BD9DABEF9D · Verify this award
About Bienville House Duplex
Logistics of this working family required them to be home indoors for long periods, which in addition to work and school became disruptive to their wellness. They began to contemplate, like many families, whether a move to the suburbs, exchanging proximity to city amenities for a larger backyard to increase outdoor access was necessary. Rather than moving far away, they decided to build a new house that would reconsider the limitations of indoor home life on a small urban lot. The organizing principle of the project was to create as much outdoor access from communal areas as possible.
Nathan Fell's Bienville House Duplex emerges as a compelling exemplar of contemporary residential architecture that navigates the perennial challenge of urban infill with remarkable sophistication, positioning itself within a lineage of modernist thought that celebrates transparency, material honesty, and contextual sensitivity while asserting confident formal identity through its bold volumetric expression and carefully calibrated palette of industrial and natural materials, the work demonstrates exceptional compositional intelligence in its vertical organization where the transparent glass-enclosed ground level appears to support a substantial cladded volume above, creating a dialogue between weightlessness and mass that rewards sustained contemplation, the chromatic strategy reveals considered restraint with cool gray fiber cement panels establishing dignified presence while warm ipe wood planters introduce organic warmth that mediates between architecture and landscape, technical accomplishment manifests in numerous details from the precisely aligned panel joints creating subtle shadow rhythms to the recessed lighting that produces the ethereal floating effect beneath the upper volume, the fenestration pattern demonstrates purposeful asymmetry suggesting functional interior hierarchy rather than arbitrary formal gesture, thematically the work explores enduring questions of domestic life in urban contexts negotiating between privacy and community engagement through its selective transparency that shields upper living quarters while opening ground floor to neighborhood interaction, the circular porthole visible through the glass facade introduces playful geometric counterpoint while potentially referencing nautical or industrial architectural traditions, the captured twilight moment with its lavender-rose sky and motion-blurred pedestrians invites meditation on the temporal dimension of architectural experience where fixed form encounters the flowing rhythms of daily life and seasonal light, viewers might consider how contemporary residential design can honor neighborhood scale while introducing fresh formal vocabularies that enrich rather than disrupt established urban fabric
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- Forms are configured to accentuate transparency between 1st Floor interior spaces and exterior. Upper floors contain private spaces, wrapped by exterior surfaces forming an echelon of suspended cubes legible from multiple viewpoints. Walls supporting the cubic forms are a series of exposed concrete walls with a gap between the walls and the cubic form to render each (the wall and cubes) distinctly. The static forms juxtapose the animated interior space as a frame, reinforcing the transparency.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Thermomass, Cast in Place Concrete Walls, two walls, 30 ft tall x 73 ft long. American Fiber Cement, Exterior Cladding and 1st Floor Ceiling, Approximately 4200 sf. LaCantina Sliding Glass Doors 12 ft high x 40 ft long, 12 ft high x 14 ft long and 12 ft high x 16 ft long. Lumenwerx, 1st Floor Linear Downlights, VIA 4 LED (22 lights). Minka Air, 1st Floor Ceiling Fans, 8 fans.
- Tags
- Urban, Outside, Transparency, Frame, Mass, Duplex, Open, Monolithic, Cubes, Communal
- Production Technology
- The exterior load bearing walls are concrete cast in place board formed ThermoMass walls which help stabilize the temperature through the thermal mass of the inside wall. Due to site constraints it was only possible to cast the 30 feet tall wall in 10 feet pours across the site, then pull the forms and frame floor as the walls cured. Form panels were reassembled above only after floor were framed.
- Design Challenge
- New Orleans is a city that is often proudly slow to change, and sometimes more romantic about the past than future. This can cast an air of inevitability over new residential development within the city, that tawdry mimicry (more associated with suburban development) is the only possible path for a design. The house is constructed using materials that make sense environmentally even if they may be unconventional regionally while using certain historic paradigms a precedent (such as the poly-entry lowest level).
- Project Duration
- The project is located in New Orleans, LA (USA) and started in January of 2017. It was completed in June of 2019.
- Operation Flow
- The duplex maximizes use of a small urban lot with space for or groups of people in each unit. The central goal of the design was to configure communal spaces in a way that best accesses outdoor light, air and volume. The rear unit consists of 4 beds, 3.5 baths and the front is a rental unit with 3 beds, 2.5 baths. The layout orients the rental unit as its public face, actively engaging travelers with the city, while mirroring the position of the primary unit with the rear yard to favor seclusion.
- Research
- Materials had to be research for practical constructability, affordability and visual appeal. Additionally, the design had to comply with local flood zone requirements, historic, zoning and code provisions without a variance. The original concept had to compressed back due to these regulation and practical restraints, resulting in a more complicated design.
- Inspiration
- Logistics of a working family requires family members stay tethered to their homes for longer periods than each would prefer. This can become disruptive to your wellness when all your time at school, work and home is spent indoors. The homeowners preferred the city to suburbs, so rather than moving far away, they decided to make a bold change by building a new house that flipped the script on indoor home life on a small urban lot.
- Image Credits
- All Photographs by Justin Cordova. All Drawings by Nathan Fell Architecture.
- Patents
- Copyrights belong to Nathan Fell