A TYPICAL SHOTGUN HOUSE

Spring 2024 | UC Berkeley CED
Housing Exercise with Jackie Zhao

This 3-week exercise involved designing a small house on a small, residential lot subdivision in the middle of the San Francisco Bay Area. Within the limitations of a 15’6 grid, setbacks, selected building elements, and code-related restrictions, the assignment explored definitions of site, program, and materialities.

For this exercise, the house is designed for a florist and their child as an investigation of age, outdoor connection, and retail space on the design of a small dwelling unit.

Exploring the overlaps of boundaries and program through thickened thresholds, the house features habitable cubes that frame transitions from the public shop front to the share kitchen and dining spaces and from the study to the individual bedrooms. Opposing offset walls expand and contract spaces to accentuate the framing of program while being unified under a simple gable roof structure that is punctured and shifted in response to the cores for appropriate lighting.

Materialities, at an abstract level, support the day-to-day operations of the florist. The warmth and vibrancy of the orange cores complement floral arrangements and contrast the muted tones of floor, ceiling, and walls. The contrast also enables the orange to emit its vibrancy throughout the main spaces of the house, and the textured finish of the exterior continues inside to connect the outdoor and indoor creativity of the florist and playspace of their child.