Hasta La Ideas

Slideshow: American architect David Jameson has completed a two-storey house in Bethesda, Maryland, with white walls that look like pixellated blocks.

The square modules create a series of cantilevers and recesses that disguise how many floors are inside.

A series of frameless windows are flush with the facade, as are the edges of the flat roof.

A double height living room is positioned at the centre of the house, overlooked by a staircase and first floor gallery with glazed balustrades.

Other recent projects by David Jameson include a house with a barcode on its facade – see it here.

Photography is by Paul Warchol.

The following information is from the architects:

NaCl

Breaking the prescriptive mould of horizontally layered homes, NaCl House aspires to render unclear the spatial organisation of the project and explore an architecture of ambiguous scale.

The resultant massing reveals an imperfect, rough-hewn form recalling the natural isometric formation of mineral rock salt.

The exterior composition is read as a single object that reflects a dynamic fluid interior.

Uncorrelated to the buildings structure, glazing panels are detailed flush to the exterior surface, eliminating shadows which further inhibit a reading of the buildings scale.

Completed: 11.2011

Interior Area: 4860 ft2

Site Acreage: 0.52 acres

Architect: David Jameson FAIA

Ron Southwick, project architect

A sequence of horizontal steel rods resemble a barcode on the glass facade of a house extension in Washington DC.

American architect David Jameson designed the four-storey extension, which provides a new kitchen, living room, balcony and roof deck to the terraced house.

The two street-facing facades of Barcode House are transparent, composed of glass panels that infill a grid of steel beams.

The narrow barcode-like rods bridge this framework, matching the heights of eaves and window frames on neighbouring properties.

A door on the first floor is the only connection between the existing house and the extension, which has its own staircase.

More American houses from the Dezeen archive include a Philadelphia residence with a glazed interior wrapped in a curved brick facade and a New York loft with glass ceilings and walls – see more stories about projects in the USA here.

Photography is by Paul Warchol.

Here’s some more text from Jameson:

Barcode House

Barcode House explores juxtapositions between the heavy and light and the old and the new.

The work is formed by positioning the project’s diverse pressures into a unique situational aesthetic.

Brittle masonry walls of the existing Washington, DC row house governed that the addition be engineered as a freestanding structure.

Site constraints dictated a vertically oriented spatial solution.

The client’s desire for transparent living space generated the opportunity to create an integrated solution for lateral force requirements.

Structural steel rods within a glass window wall are aligned with datum lines of the neighboring building elevations. A stucco circulation tower anchors the living space to the existing row house.

See also:

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Townhouse by Elding Oscarson	Tokyo Balconies by KINO Architects	Glass Loggia House by Allen Jack+Cottier