Contraction House is a house for the daughter and son-in-law of an extended family. It is a precedent for revisions to suburban zoning regulations, which prohibit multiple houses being built on the same property thus also prohibiting the development of more complex relationships between both the people and the structures they inhabit.
The folded wall of the contraction house sits adjacent to a beautiful urbane lawn in a larger pocket of trees. It inhabits the zone between the lawn of the main and guest houses and the adjacent service court which organizes garages and barns.
The transition between cultivated lawn and rougher stream landscape is where the space of contraction occurs ... twisting the vertical "facade" and "urbane" wall of the 19th century farmhouse vocabulary with its very seperate interior and exterior spaces and releasing into the open, inside-outside relationship and horizontal extension of the main living spaces into the woodlands. This transition occurs in structure as well, moving from a conventional wood frame into an entirely cantilevered, partially exposed frame supported on paired steel columns, which play with the landscape of trees beyond.
