The Northern Liberties neighborhood, just north of Center City in Philadelphia, used to be a decrepit Rust Belt remnant, but it now attracts the artist crowd.
Built like its neighbors, over a century ago and part of a continuous network of buildings in a historical district, this 3,250-square-foot former commercial building has been completely renovated into a three-story town house that retained its traditional limestone facade—a requirement due to the historical status of the building.
On a sloping lot, with views to the west, the architects were asked to design a house for a family in an urban setting that would express the client and designers’ shared love of simple materials and clean detailing, and the desire for well juxtaposed spaces.
The house that architect Eero Saarinen completed in 1957 for J. Irwin Miller and his family in Columbus, Indiana, easily qualifies as a paragon of residential midcentury Modernism.
An existing three-story 1920s mercantile building located in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood is extensively renovated into a house that incorporates dramatic new design gestures while maintaining a respect for the original building.
From certain angles, the house resembles the gable-roofed cottages in the Swiss village of Riedikon, which dates back at least to the early 8th century, on the lake known as Greifensee, near Zurich. Come closer and you realize this house, with its pitched, tentlike roof, its strip window following the angled roofline, and its enclosing screen of 315 vertical spruce slats, rough sawn on the sides and CNC-milled on the front and back, is nothing like its neighbors. The 3,175-square-foot house, designed by Zurich firm Gramazio & Kohler Architecture and Urbanism, is a reinterpretation of the regional typology that, as
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