Kengo Kuma and Associates | lucien pellat-finet Shinsaibashi. New Canaan, Connecticut USA 2010.07 Private Residence 830 m2 This is a project in Connecticut (US) to repair a residence designed by Joe Black Leigh, and add a new house to the site. New Canaan is known as a town where many houses from the 1950s by such architects as Philip Johnson and Marcel Breuer still remain, and the one we worked on was the residence for Joe Black Leigh (built in 1956), also a friend of Philip Johnson. Our aim was to inherit the spirit of its beautiful glass architecture, or in other words, the spirit of New Canaan. The existing building was a symmetric glass box of Palladian villa architecture, standing solitarily in a forest.
We built a new house to make this glass box orthogonal and formed an L-shaped terrain, as an attempt to create a kind of “intimacy” in the forest. We gave a major change also in the existing house, by getting rid of the symmetry and covering the exterior with wooden louvers, so that the architecture would gain more “intimacy”. Laboratory for Visionary Architecture. +++++ Lussi + Halter dipl. Architekten ETH SIA BSA +++++ Jean Christophe QUINTON. João Luís Carrilho da Graça. JDS ARCHITECTS. LAVA Laboratory for Visionary Architecture.