This American Life

The Barn: the quintessential form of American architecture, agriculture, and culture. Can we recreate the representation of Americana, while still relating and incorporating its rural roots? This project in particular uses Grant Wood’s iconic “American Gothic” as a stepping stone in developing a re-imagined farm house that is both contemporary and still draws from the barn’s pastoral past. The original farm house is blown out of scale, repeated, exaggerated, and aggregated. From a single family home, we result in a mass multi-family communal long house, where a part-to-whole relationship interchanges throughout. Spectrums of privacy and publicity interplay within the building, where 21st century communal living allow for individual bedrooms, shared kitchens, communal work spaces, and public markets. The iconic American Gothic house itself is the building block of the whole structure, forming individual houses, moderate apartments, and larger complexes that congregate, blend, and situate themselves within each other. The sense of interiority and exteriority becomes distorted as one house inserts itself into another or the poche between two intersections becomes occupiable.