Ferne McGregor Architecture

The first design project of Design Resolution 1, titled ‘Infill’, challenged students to design a home in a small, derelict site in Digbeth. Following a short collaborative site analysis project, the focus shifted to a small plot of land, measuring approximately four by twelve metres, between two buildings on Floodgate Street. Students were challenged to include speculative future technologies which could enhance their designs as part of a challenge to design a “home for the future”.

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I began with a closer investigation of the immediate site, analysing the surrounding buildings types, heights and materials, which would later inform my own design decisions. The next step was to select two speculative clients from a recent newspaper, which in this case were Gregg Wallace, known for co-presenting television show such as MasterChef, and Jennifer Aniston, known for her role in the 90s sitcom ‘Friends’. I began to research their current homes in order to determine their tastes and what they might like in a future home – both appeared to live in fairly large, spacious homes, for example, so despite the restricted size of the site I intended to create a home which felt as spacious as possible. At this stage in the project, I also began to analyse a number of precedent studies on similarly restricted sites, in order to see what issues there were and how these were addressed. From my research, I decided that a central staircase which also functioned as a lightwell would be a suitable solution to reducing the amount of space taken up by circulation whilst also getting as much light as possible into the centre of the long, narrow site.

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From here, I began to experiment with floor plan layouts until I found a configuration that suited the daylight availability of the site – in the end, this meant shifting the main living spaces up to the first floor, and implementing a home cinema in the darkest area of the site with no access to sunlight. The final design featured the aforementioned home cinema alongside the kitchen on the ground floor, a living room and home art studio – a nod to Aniston’s interest in art and sculpting – on the first floor, and two en-suite bedrooms on the second floor. The house is punctured by the central staircase, made of a speculative glass which shifts between translucent and transparent when not in use. A full set of orthographics was produced, including floor plans, site plan, elevation, sections, and an atmospheric section. A final model was also created, and a material palette accompanied the drawings.

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For my first design project, I think the outputs produced were of a good quality – the drawings are clean and easy to read, although it may have been interesting to apply the material palette to a set of drawings to more accurately represent the design. I think the final model was the weakest output, due to a lack of time and modelling experience, and if rebuilt with my current knowledge it could be done to a much higher quality. The atmospheric section was a successful first attempt at digital rendering, although it lacks enough background context and could have used more contrast to better emphasise the effect of the lightwell on the internal spaces. In hindsight, many improvements could be made to the layout of the house. For example, the currently south-facing art studio space could be swapped with the living room to give more privacy to the terrace, and more consistent daylight for the studio. Other minor adjustments could be made to certain drawings, such as more contrast between my design and the surrounding context in the site elevation. Regardless, I believe that the outcome of this project was a fairly successful attempt at addressing a difficult site, with little prior experience of either designing or representing an entire house.