PIEDMONT FOUR SEASON HOUSE
RALEIGH NC
SINGLE FAMILY
2021
The Piedmont Four Season House is a single family home in the rural outskirts just south of Raleigh. In this project, we reconsider the age-old notion of “regionalism” that suggests architecture respond to the various characteristics of its locality, be it history, climate, light, material, etc.
While a contextual approach to design remains a concern within architectural discourse, the modern construction industry has standardized and reduced the architect’s material palette, and climate-driven design approaches are increasingly made moot by advances in building technologies. Within this contracted playing field running out of problems to solve, “contextual”, or “regional” architectural designs are often relegated to superficial material treatments or post-modern allusions to esoteric shapes. Additionally, the task of finding a vernacular form is made absurd in regions like Raleigh, where four distinct, but mild seasons are experienced, and local history offers little in the way of traditional or recognizable building forms due to a being a late-growth city only recently populated with people and culture.
Freeing the building massing from any formalistic burdens of historic references or climate performance, the Piedmont Four Season House instead looks to the way a resident’s use of the house might change with the mildly fluctuating seasons and responds to it in the plan. The house is organized around a central dining space that selectively connects the various zones of the house according to season, creating a fluid plan designed to provide human comfort, attuned to the nuanced seasonal changes.