Jungle House
a house for confronting the self
June 2020 - Brooklyn, New York
The project proposes a confrontation ground between the prescribed domestic & non-scripted space of the tropical jungle, all in the context of Brooklyn, NY. The main living area of the house is a jungle, created through an infrastructural grid, a series of tropical clusters, creating different atmospheres & manipulating space formation. Here the modes of inhabitation are not imposed, instead of freedom of the jungle impedes the familiar habits to take place as they would in the city, challenging the inhabitants' daily lives.
On an urban scale the city developed its own coping mechanism through the makeshift natural habitat of Central Park, a tool to counter act the overwork.
Within this charged context of the NY landscape lie the 2 main characters of the research : the precarious workers & the NY millionares, both working long hours to create a living and a social status in the city.
An emerging phenomena within the millionaires and large corporations are the retreats. Therefore, retreats are becoming both extreme environments defying the modernity of life & exceptional spaces seeked by humans in the effort to cope with the pressures of the urban environment. Retreats are ritualistic hyperbolas of time, used by overachievers in their attempt to balance overwork. In the case of the precarious workers, similar experiences can be found within the hidden areas of Williamsburg.
The proposal is for a house.The Jungle House is composed of 4 main parts: the ritualistic entrance, aninfrastructural grid to deliver the required services, the jungle of selected species creating space for inhabitation, a storage space of domestic objects to be arranged around the jungle by the users & 2 side exits. The jungle and the inhabitants will be fully reliant on the infrastructural grid. The grid serves for structure, distribution of infrastructure & maintenance of the Jungle house. However the jungle vegetation & the soil will take over the grid, allowing only the relevant infrastructural nodes, such as plugs to be visible to the inhabitants.
The design is based on space creation through the quantitative qualities of plants. The complex clusters of species is where space is formed. The species were chosen based on their size, smell, tactile features, humidity requirement & humidity creation, shadow casting. These were achieved by mapping light, humidity, smell & heat conditions across the jungle grid.The space created is not defined by typical arch components, nor does it support a conventional way of living for all the inhabitants. The architecture is created through the quantitative qualities of tropical species, space is formed by clusters of plants, the rooms are created by the opportunist inhabitant looking for a place to dwell. Architecture is at the border between nature & user initiative, all bridged by the consideration of the botanical species choice.
This project would not have been possible without the tremendous support of Brendon Carlin & James Kwang-Ho Chung.
