Location: Calgary, Canada.
Architect: Modern Office of Design + Architecture.
Gallery House is a 6,500 sq.ft single-family residence designed for a family of four, located in the community of Bel-Aire Calgary, AB. It explores the possibilities of confluence or blurring of the disparate programmatic elements that typically constitute a single-family residence, such as utilities, circulation, and public and private space. By liberating the basement from its horizontal, subterranean position and rotating it vertically, the basement now serves as a sectional fulcrum, containing the requisite program typically associated with a basement and doubling as a gallery to display the family’s extensive art collection. This new typology facilitates the distribution of various programmatic requirements over multiple datums vs. being restricted to static, individual floor plates. The slow, undulating nature of the circulation ramp also necessitates the arrangement of multiple floor plates at multiple datum heights, reanimating daily domestic rituals. The massing of the house is a direct response to the programmatic layout of its interiors, with four volumes pushing and pulling from the sectional fulcrum of the utility/circulation/art promenade.
The massing critiques the monolithic typology of single-family housing by breaking down the massing into smaller, individual pavilions that not only represent a more human-scale, porous approach to residential architecture but also creatively contribute to the inclusion of diffused, natural light throughout the building. The four pavilions are tapered towards the top to facilitate a tectonic rupture in the ceiling plane that floods the interior with natural light via four large, skylights. The natural light interacts with the multiple datums of the floor plates, creating an interesting spectral condition of contrast. The tapered massing also references the surrounding context, abstracting the traditional gabled roof into a contemporized trapezoidal form.