4D: a Live Work Environment

This renovation project demonstrates strategies for the flexible, pragmatic, and affordable reuse of small urban apartments.

The site for this renovation was an aging 1935 Art-deco condominium located in Ottawa’s transitional Centretown neighborhood. The original space had comprised two one-bedroom units made of tiny spaces that were combined into a single space measuring fifteen feet wide by eighty feet long.

The premise for this apartment renovation was threefold: two practical considerations and one conceptual. First, the project examined the premise that patterns of domestic inhabitation are not stable entities but rather are subject to evolving physical, seasonal, social, and work requirements. Hence, the first challenge was to invent a way in which to make “Apartment 4-D” a live-work environment that was “infinitely” variable to accommodate unforeseeable life changes without necessitating subsequent costly renovations or moves.

The second premise was a conceptual one. The architect sought to invert the conventional use of “poché” — the architectural spaces of any home or building in which the untidy realities of life (bathrooms, closets, etc.) are hidden away from public view, often themselves rigidly separating public and private living spaces. The poché in 4-D is flexible and celebrates, rather than obscures, life’s messiness.

The third premise, also practical, involved the issue of light. The unit, although it has eighteen windows, receives marginal natural light, as all but two windows face north into the building’s courtyard. Hence, the renovation aimed to improve the distribution of daylight and introduce various means of artificial light so as to compensate for the near absence of daily and seasonal light changes within the apartment’s interior.

Moving, floor-to-ceiling linen-backed tempered glass screens suspended from an eighty-foot-long track along the wall with windows, now roll aside to permit light in the daytime; at night they roll in to obscure the windows, yielding privacy yet projecting the silhouettes of 4-D’s occupants to the outside. Recessed lights located within window heads allow the windows to remain sources of light even at night.

The sleeping area of 4-D questions our culture’s exaggerated desires for privacy through its relationship to the adjoining master bathroom. These spaces are divided only by clear glass, visually enlarging both areas; wooden blinds along the glass can be lowered to separate them. The master bathroom’s other wall, a plumbing wall, faces the balance of the apartment, and is made of glass backed in a sheer, red silk, through which can appear traces of a body within that bathroom’s cast concrete tub. In this way 4-D calls to mind the fluctuating line between what we deem to be “private” and “erotic.” Likewise, the “body” of the building in the form of pipes, waste stacks, and electrical conduit is displayed through the red-toned glass. The messiness of life here becomes ornament.

Three areas of the apartment floor are recessed, plumbed to drains, and then covered by slatted wooden surfaces, permitting showering/bathing throughout. Entry into the apartment is onto one of the shower areas, which also serves as a place to manage the residue of the Canadian climate by enabling the washing off of seasonal mud, grit, and slush from human shoes and feet as well as puppy paws.

Storage is managed by rolling cabinets. These cabinets have three glass faces similar to the rolling screens described above and one operable wood face. Each holds specific contents (one for each of coats, files, the refrigerator, linens, etc.), but the cabinets’ racks and drawers can be quickly reconfigured as needs change over time. Lights within each cabinet illuminate contents for convenience and transform the cabinet into a “lantern” through which the silhouettes of each cabinet’s contents are captured on the translucent glass surfaces. The cabinets can be “parked” out of the way on the apartment’s edge to maximize living space, be arranged separately as playful lanterns “free” in space, or can be rolled alongside each other creating “walls” when practicality requires more private subspaces. The gaps left in the floor by the former walls have been filled with concrete. Thus, the previous floor plan remains intact as a thematic reminder that, as with people, spaces can be flexible to accommodate change.