Selected as Finalist February 2015

Marfa House is a community of neighborhoods formed under one roof. The design evokes the long, low slung industrial buildings that dot the vast Texas landscape and places is it at scale with the surrounding community.
Deep recesses, courtyards, and a generous green space break the scale down at the curb to feel more residential. The neighborhoods are created by the physical and social connections of the homes and inhabitants within it.

Each neighborhood coalesces around a small courtyard that provides a sheltered green space and a gracious entry to each home. Neighborhoods then spill onto a shared green space that rises eleven feet to the level of the
roof to capture the far off desert landscape. 

Each home is an expression of how contemporary Marfa can develop. The car is embraced, but controlled, as a vital tool of living in the west. Generous rooms blend together to share in the abundance of in-direct light that peels across the wood ceilings of the spaces. The exterior is accessed through select, full wall folding glass doors or courtyards that draw light and air into the center of each home.

The design is a careful assembly of the physical qualities that make Marfa unique and the new social dynamics that draw people to Marfa – largely provoked by the creative developments of Donald Judd and the Chinati Foundation. It is not a hyper-dense urban assembly, but it is also not a building that fills the land needlessly or without criticality. It is a response to the need for Marfa to embrace all aspects of its ever-changing community, to seek more sustainable and environmental uses for its resources, and to balance this with maintaining the character that draw people and ideas to Marfa.

Marfa, Texas

Competition 2014

Articles

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