The Deep Dive: Anything Goes

As any issue of Dwell proves, the choice of material or joinery method can transform a good project into a design for the ages. The Deep Dive is a forum where design and building pros can obsess over those details. Here we ask expert colleagues to share the inspiration behind house elements that delight clients—as well as the nitty-gritty information about how they were built.  

Architect Keith Burns says he's attracted to "a question-driven approach to design"—a philosophy shared by his clients, Honora Dunham and Ted Power. Their gut renovation of a Long Island City, Queens, rowhouse unfolded thanks to a six-week thought exercise that set the foundation of the project featured in our September/October issue.  

Burns’s predilection for design that prizes curiosity dates to his entrance in the profession. He pursued his first job at REX, the New York–based firm that spun out of OMA which, like its Dutch progenitor, leverages analysis to challenge convention. "I remember we used to talk about advancing design in a Darwinistic way, asking ourselves, ‘What is the fittest design solution for this problem?’" Burns says. At his eponymous studio, he nourishes investigation with a smaller team in part by choosing unique sites attached to ambitious clients—and the 19th-century semi-detached house that Honora and Ted had purchased not far from the East River waterfront ticked off those boxes from the get-go.  

"When they came to me, we talked about the whole gamut of possibilities," Burns recalls. "I think Ted and Honora quickly realized that their house was not maintained well, so the brief from the beginning was to fact-find the potential for the site." 

As for the site itself, the architect calls it "inherently cool." Located on a street where row houses and apartments stand cheek by jowl with an electrical supply warehouse, bakery, and ATM distribution center, "this building clearly did not fit into the current zoning envelope," Burns says, adding that the clients were enthused about making a home on the edge of a more squarely residential neighborhood. 

To sustain a spirit of inquiry through the project’s duration, Burns conducted a concept phase prior to asking Honora and Ted to sign a full contract. The process not only confirmed that architect and client were a good match in terms of outlook, but also determined the scope of work—namely, that modernizing the existing structure dovetailed the budget as well as concern for embodied carbon and neighborhood fabric.

The ensuing challenge, then, was to accommodate a family of four on two floors each comprising a mere 670 square feet, and to do so while imparting a sense of homey separation from this highly variable stretch of Long Island City.   

As feature writer Angelina Torre reported in the September/October feature, "The rear lot is hemmed in by three [unfenestrated] masonry walls of about the same, one-and-a-half-story height," yielding an exterior experience that Burns likens to a James Turrell installation. He then used it as the linchpin of the renovation design. Rather than treat the front porch in a more traditionally social way, the architect reconceived it as a multipurpose entry sequence that accommodates circulation, sanitation bins, and firewood storage, and he placed clerestory windows on the adjacent first-floor facade to shield interior life from passersby. The floor-to-ceiling arrangement of windows and glass doors on the opposite elevation, meanwhile, ensures daylight penetration and cross-ventilation and focuses occupants’ attention on the outdoor room they have all to themselves. "The domesticity here is insular," Burns observes. 

The concept phase generated design decisions and smaller features as much as it did an overall parti. The open-plan first floor is a direct response to the fenestration of its public and rear facades, for instance, while Burns employed unframed, pivot-hinged doors, as well as curtained closets, for the more compartmentalized second floor because its very limited footprint precluded detailing that would have consumed more space.  

Thinking more broadly, the architect believes his work with Honora and Ted corroborates the ways by which he feels out residential clients—which, in addition to a concept phase, includes an extensive questionnaire, reference images, concept models, and asking lots of questions. The methods supplement the intuition of an initial interaction and preliminary site research. They also have very practical payoffs, as Burns concludes: "We started schematic design with a more realistic budget than what a homeowner-client typically walks in the door with. This allowed for a quicker design process, and allowed us to focus more intensely on aspects that were within scope and budget. The result is a more complete design for the time schedule, with change orders ostensibly limited to the impossible-to-know structural issues that sometimes arise on renovation projects."