Tattuplex: Pre-Fab Beyond The Box. The client, a Zen Buddhist nurse, envisioned his new home as a compound, a place for community and celebration as well as reflection and recuperation. He wanted to combine complexity of space with simplicity of materials, create a strong indoor-outdoor connection, offer a variety of rooms filled with light and air, and provide a continuous ambulatory for meditative walks. We started by abandoning the box. The project was designed in SketchUp and translated to Revit before being digitally fabricated. We deployed a three-axis, equilateral grid to accommodate a 1,100-square-foot one-bedroom unit below and a 600-square-foot studio above for this kit-of-parts duplex. Modest moves such as rotating the plan twelve degrees and by using pop-outs where it made sense increased the livability of the spaces while establishing axes that opened up a multiplicity of views unavailable otherwise. For the construction, we took common, everyday materials and methods and pushed them to new uses. First, by imposing the hexagonal order upon the typically rectilinear technologies of board-formed concrete and red steel, this then prompted the modification of virtually every other element — from the plumbing and mechanical systems, to the built-in cabinetry, to the off-the shelf steel ...
Tattuplex: Pre-Fab Beyond The Box. The client, a Zen Buddhist nurse, envisioned his new home as a compound, a place for community and celebration as well as reflection and recuperation. He wanted to combine complexity of space with simplicity of materials, create a strong indoor-outdoor connection, offer a variety of rooms filled with light and air, and provide a continuous ambulatory for meditative walks. We started by abandoning the box. The project was designed in SketchUp and translated to Revit before being digitally fabricated. We deployed a three-axis, equilateral grid to accommodate a 1,100-square-foot one-bedroom unit below and a 600-square-foot studio above for this kit-of-parts duplex. Modest moves such as rotating the plan twelve degrees and by using pop-outs where it made sense increased the livability of the spaces while establishing axes that opened up a multiplicity of views unavailable otherwise. For the construction, we took common, everyday materials and methods and pushed them to new uses. First, by imposing the hexagonal order upon the typically rectilinear technologies of board-formed concrete and red steel, this then prompted the modification of virtually every other element — from the plumbing and mechanical systems, to the built-in cabinetry, to the off-the shelf steel ...