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Architects: Atelier RZLBD
- Area: 122 m²
- Year: 2024
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Photographs:Riley Snelling
Text description provided by the architects. Located in East York, Toronto, Periscope House is a renovation-addition project in which the existing one-story bungalow is renovated and a second floor is added on top. It was commissioned by a young professional couple with two children, to create a more personalized and sustainable setting for their lives. Coinciding with the pandemic, however, which has doubled or even tripled the material costs, it eventually went through a drastic revision, which resulted in removing half of the second floor and relocating children's bedrooms to the ground floor. Yet, by utilizing the removed area as a void, the project has gained a series of double-height spaces on the ground floor, which has bestowed a distinctive exterior form that resembles a periscope or an antique camera with an accordion bellow.
The location of the existing staircase, which is at the north-central part of the existing house, has remained, arranging the programs. To the front are all the public programs—the entry foyer, the mudroom, and the kitchen to the north and a sequence of the sitting room, the living room, and the dining room to the south. To the rear, past the staircase, are all the private programs, such as the bedrooms and the bathrooms, both on the ground floor and the second floor. The new second floor accommodates two major restrictions. First, the new zoning by-laws have enforced a greater side setback, reducing the building width from the south, yet a greater building length, generating a cantilevered structure towards the rear yard. To accentuate the building length even further, two bay windows are added, one on the front at the ground-floor level and another on the rear at the second-floor level, which are permitted encroachments by the zoning by-laws. Second, the strict construction budget followed by the inflation has led to the partial construction of the second floor. Rather than not building it at all, however, half of the second floor has been utilized as an extra ceiling height for the ground floor, introducing spaces of three different scales under the stepped ceiling. The extent of the stepped ceiling has been defined to correspond to the programs underneath, which are the kitchen and the dining room (with the highest ceiling), the mud room and the living room, and the entry foyer and the sitting room (with the lowest ceiling). In contrast to the stepped ceiling, the open-concept floor plan can curate one grand space when needed, dissolving the programmatic divisions. The discrepancy between the width of the existing house and that of the new second floor has been resolved by a linear built-in bench niche, which serves and connects the dining room, the living room, and the sitting room as one continuous, organic space volume.
The front bay window and the three clearstory windows bring dynamic plays of natural light into this double-height space. Located in the intervals of the stepped ceiling, the clearstory windows are matched in width and position with the front bay window, creating visual rhythm and consistency both inside and outside. Through the front bay window, the view can travel all the way to the upper balcony. If the bay window is a viewfinder, through which one looks inside the apparatus that is the building, the clearstory windows act like an aperture, which intakes different amounts of light throughout the day to expose different sceneries inside. The rear bay window, which is in the master bedroom on the second floor, captures the outside. As with the front bay window, it is offset from both the floor and the ceiling, providing a sitting nook where one can enjoy the vista of the neighborhood.
Periscope House is the fusion of the existing, the new, and the context of its creation (time, place, etc.). Simultaneously, it has developed into an experiment or an observation on how building less can liberate an architectural space from its many preconceived formulas. Towards sustainability, affordability, and architectural integrity in the scale of single-family houses, the atelier has presented many renovation-addition projects in the city. Among these, Periscope House initiates a new category, setting another step forward in this endeavor.
