감각적인 공간구성이 돋보입니다.
기존에 사용되던 공장을 리뉴얼하여 싱글주거를 위한
원룸계획안입니다. 높은 층고를 이용한 복층구조는
좁고 긴 공간을 효율적으로 분할하여 사용할 수 있도록 도와주는 아이디어 입니다.
사실 우리나라에 많이 보이는 복층형 오피스텔에서 많이 보이는 타입이라 그렇게
신기하고 재미있지는 않지만 최소한의 터치로 디자인되는 공간의 합리성은
이번 프로젝트의 좋은 점 입니다.
하지만 여기서 주목해야 할 점은 실수요자를 위한 합리적인 가격의 접근이야 말로
우리가 지금의 도심형생활주택과 원룸형 오피스텔에서 풀어야할 커다란 숙제가 아닐까 싶습니다.
reviewed by SJ
New York City is the nation’s capital of cramped quarters. But for a
select lucky few, scant square footage adds up to a cozy home to call
one’s own.
"He’s good at puzzles,” says Wonbo Woo of his father, architect Kyu Sung
Woo. That makes Wonbo a fortunate son, as the spatial challenge posed
by the 30-year-old ABC News producer’s loft—which Woo père had offered,
as the ultimate in housewarming gifts, to redesign—was puzzling indeed.
The apartment, located in a converted Union Square hat factory, captured
the younger man’s attention with its eccentric qualities—it’s 50 feet
in length, but only 12 and a half feet wide—and the fact that the
undulating vaulted ceiling was comfortingly familiar. “My father
designed the house I grew up in in Cambridge [Massachusetts], and it had
a vaulted ceiling in my bedroom,” Wonbo recalls. “I’m not sure how
conscious it was, but the loft actually did remind me of home.”
The developer renovation that had rendered the not-quite-700-square-foot
space a tangled web of unrelated rooms, however, inspired no such warm
feelings. Entering, Woo encountered a bathroom and kitchen, the areas
above them completely boxed in—“they didn’t know what to do with the
space, so they just dropped the ceiling,” he says—followed by an
enormous sleeping loft that sat atop a five-foot-high storage enclosure.
“That’s typical in Manhattan loft construction, where you don’t have
quite enough for two full floors,” explains associate architect Choon
Choi, indicating the ceiling, which rises to just over 12 feet at its
peak. “They line up all the elements side by side against one wall, and
block off the spaces above and below.”
Whatever the rationale, the overall effect was grim. “It was cluttered
and tight, not spacious at all,” Choi recalls. “And very dark,” adds
Woo. “The back of the sleeping loft was a flat wall that stopped the
light.”
The goal of the renovation, says Choi, was a balance between density and
porosity: “We set out to maximize the space—to make full use of every
cubic inch of this volume—without blocking anything out.” The client,
too, sought an interlinking of opposites, though of a different kind.
“I’ve inherited my father’s aesthetic,” Wonbo observes, referring to the
elder Woo’s modernist vocabulary. “But if I have a complaint about
modern design, it’s that it’s sometimes not”—he hesitates, then utters
the C word—“cozy.” Recalling the home in which his family lived prior to
his father’s creation, an 1870s Cambridge residence, Wonbo says,
pointedly, “I was glad to have had the experience of living in a cozy
place.” Thus, whatever other feats the design may accomplish, an
infusion of this intangible element remained essential.
To determine just how much unseen space they had to work with, the
architects cut a small hole into the wall abutting the sleeping loft,
peered in, and made a startling discovery: Not only was the area above
the kitchen and bathroom completely unobstructed, they could see all the
way into the identical space in the apartment across the hallway.
“There was no closure in between,” Choi says, adding, with a grin,
“during construction, it was very tempting to just kind of build into
that loft.”
Though he resisted this secret annexation, architect Woo recognized that
the drawback that defeated the developers—the not-quite-high-enough
ceiling—could be overcome using the skill cited by his son: a knack for
puzzles. Having decided to site the new loft bedroom directly above the
kitchen, the architects met the challenge of stacking two rooms, each
with a seven-foot ceiling height, in only 12 feet of vertical space by
creating two interlocking puzzle pieces: The mattress in the bedroom
sits directly atop the ultra-thin kitchen ceiling (which enables a
full-height space downstairs), and the floor area around the mattress is
two feet lower than the platform on which it sits (thereby creating a
full-height circulation area up above).
The puzzle’s success, of course, is built on the user’s expectations.
“When you walk into a bedroom, most of it is taken up by the bed, which
is usually two feet higher than the floor,” Choi explains. Such is the
case here—the difference being that the “platform bed” that supports
Wonbo’s mattress is actually hollow, its empty interior space filled by
the upper part of the kitchen. As Choi puts it, “Rather than putting a
bed on top of the floor, we raised the floor to form the bed.”
The architects also made productive use of the volume separating kitchen
from hallway, inserting the refrigerator into one side and the loft’s
principal closet in the other. And they revealed their “trick” by
leaving the edge of the upstairs floor exposed, an elegant architectural
gesture that’s practical as well. “If there’s someone up top, you can
hand something to them more easily,” Choi explains. (A panel of tempered
glass protects Wonbo from accidentally tumbling from bed into the
kitchen.)
Most people would be satisfied extracting one decent-sized bedroom from
such minimal square footage. But, as Wonbo puts it, “I was hoping to
have a second bed, so I wouldn’t have to give mine to my mother every
time she came to visit.” Although some psychotherapist has surely been
deprived of a client as a result, Woo satisfied his son’s request by
slipping a second sleeping platform above the bathroom. The space is
tighter than the “master suite” (and low-ceilinged, as the
interlocking-puzzle strategy was thwarted by spatial limitations), but
it remains an effective short-term accommodation.
The design team minimized renovation costs by purchasing nearly all the
hardware and appliances from catalogues and websites; this includes a
loft stair, made to measure by a company called Lapeyre Stair, that
resembles an exercise machine but is in fact a space-saving alternative
to a ladder. They also sharply limited their palette. “If you take out
the lighting, hardware, stair, and appliances, there’s little left
except drywall,” says Choi. “We have just two materials,” he jokes,
“maple and paint.”
Yet the exceptional thoughtfulness of the design—the way it not only
interlocks but overlaps rooms, compresses and releases space, withholds
and reveals views, contrasts the angular and the planar, and preserves
unbroken the long, flowing expanse of ceiling—makes the loft seem more
complex, and much bigger, than it is.
“I’ve lived in New York ten years, so I’m definitely used to small
spaces,” says Wonbo. “This feels palatial. It’s almost like having a
two-bedroom.” Yet he believes that an essential pleasure of living small
has been preserved. “The nice thing about a small space is that it’s
intimate, and there’s still quite a bit of that remaining here,” he
says. “There’s a very loft-feeling living room, and there is
a”—yes—“cozy feeling upstairs.”
It’s possible that some of that coziness derives from the fact that many
of the design elements, including the Lapeyre stair, appear in the Woo
family’s Cambridge house. “It’s kind of shocking,” Wonbo admits. “It’s
not like I went home again—I feel like home came here.” Which, he
suggests, is not entirely a bad thing. “There’s definitely a feeling of
my dad in this place. And of our family.”
from dwell
