How should a piece of land, once wilderness, then field, evolve and grow into an integral part of a community? This project, The Upton Oxmoor, sits within the historic Oxmoor Farm, a 3,000 acre estate first surveyed in 1774. The parcel precedes the Revolution and even the statehood of Kentucky. The area still retains its rural agrarian context despite the intrusion of interstate highways and shopping malls; the original farmhouse is now a rich site of the state’s history. The architectural design attempted to make connections to the architectural farmhouse context and to the land and its farming past. The idea of placemaking in the 21st century without erasing the past was important: progress and urban development tracks a transect from rural/agrarian to village/sub-urban in this area, and care needs to be given to re-invent apartment communities so that a pervasive sameness does not dominate the landscape or the language of the architecture.
The architecture sets up a modern agrarian typology, taking cues from the layout and scale of a farmstead: the main house, the barn, the stables, the outparcel buildings together form a working community. This project attempts something similar, but in a contemporary way:
* A pair of blue modern ‘barns,’ with standing seam metal roofs and birdsmouth hayloft detailing, become the main architectural statement (and the tallest element, at four stories);
* A single elevated concrete slab creates two parking levels that ‘corral’ the cars in the center of the project, convenient and unobtrusive for the residents, but hidden from the more scenic views on the periphery of the site;
* A paired-gable form organizes the scale and massing of the apartment houses, allowing a more contemporary roof pitch to set the tone for the high contrast white and bronze walls; with nine buildings arranged in a square, their paired gables create a farmstead village identity.
* The apartment buildings are ‘pulled apart,’ offering skybridges that bring light into the corridors and breaking up large buildings into better-scaled ones. This architectural action also creates many more corner units than a project typically has.
* The residents move in the pedestrian ‘street’ between the parking and the buildings, connecting them to each other and the amenities in the clubhouse building at the front and encouraging a sense of community. These smaller areas are designed as gathering places, with strategic amenities such as fire pits, lawn games, built in granite grilles, and seating all encourage meeting one’s neighbors.
The Upton Oxmoor today.
Literal and formal borrowing of the barn forms, reinterpreted for contemporary housing.
After touring the nearly finished project, we went to shoot sporting clays across the Ohio River in New Albany, Indiana. Their barn was an affirmation of sorts. Yes, You stole from the right places.
The double barrel Italian shotgun I used. Evidently this can be an expensive hobby.
Transect of the evolution of rural land to urban, taken from Garden Cities: Theory and Practice of Agrarian Urbanism
Evolution of farmlands into villages can be planned or unplanned.
Site plan.
Early aerial study.
A warm, vague, optimistic image from our competition entry.
Rendering.
