Project: Redaction House
Architects: Johnsen Schmaling Architects
Location: Oconomowoc, WI, United States
Area: 2,430 sq ft
Photographs by: John J. Macaulay, courtesy of Johnsen Schmaling Architects
Just over 30 miles west of Milwaukee, a colorful new house brings all the attributes of urban living to this bucolic landscape. The Redaction House – designed by the Milwaukee-based Johnsen Schmaling Architects is a 2,430 sq ft home that was created for a fiber artist and her family.
It is organized around a series of voids cut into the three-story building mass which accommodate a covered second-floor deck, an entry court and a double-height living room on the inside.
From the architects: “A compact home for a textile artist and her young family, the Redaction House sits on a narrow sliver of land on a small suburban lake, surrounded by prosaic spec homes crowding the shoreline. The building, a simple wood cube on a stepped brick podium carved into the sloping site, is deliberately introvert, functioning as an optic filter that frames the limited lake vista while strategically editing out views of the built-up context.”
“A series of spatial voids carved into the building volume organize the program, starting with a linear entry courtyard along a brick wall whose decreasing perforation begins the process of visual redaction and leads to the transparent front door. Inside, floor-to-ceiling apertures alternate with solid walls, taking advantage of sightlines that are desirable and screen those that are not. The rooms are grouped around a two-story living hall, where the apertures are stacked vertically to frame views of the sky and the bluff’s deciduous foliage.”
“The wood cube is clad in horizontal cedar, complemented by vertical cedar between the deeply recessed apertures. Here, narrow painted boards create an unexpected filigree of colors, a subtle nod at the polychrome threads in the fiber artist’s own work.”
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