Pottery Vault House

My house for a pottery residency in the Hudson Valley explores a way of living and working built on a community where labor over a creative productivity is shared. The house uses barrel vaults as an architectural language to build together live and work spaces under one roof.

As the predominant building material, clay generates microclimates suitable for human habitation, allowing humans to domesticate the vault. By bringing the vault close to the scale of the individual and by creating rooms through the use of precise openings, the vault, which has been historically institutional or even sacred, can be domesticated.

On the human scale, through their convergences and divergences, the vaults create spaces of varied openness and privacy between co-residents. On the building scale, the architectural form orchestrates the flow of natural elements—water, heat, sun—and the human interaction with these natural resources.