.020 Highlawn Residence

In architecture, time is tangibly spatial. Taken shortly after the project was completed, in the fall of 2014, the photographs herein preserve the surviving memories of an inceptive moment when the space is first filled with time. Against the expanse of the wood floor and the alabaster walls, the southern light, admitted through the clerestory windows along the ceiling, sweeps like a clock’s arm across the living space. On the other side of the hall situates the low-lying strip windows which, in a single breath, capture a continuous scroll of the north shore mountains, magnificent under the calm northern sky. Whereas in smaller, private spaces such as bathrooms, natural light trickles down the dark, solitary interiors, counting time by the drop. In the architect’s mind, these images record the fleeting sensation of a new beginning, a blank canvas that awaits the inhabitants and the many seasons of their lives.

In designing Highlawn Residence, we continued our exploration on the temporal and emotional aspects of space, which have been standing preoccupations of our practice. Central to our thinking is the idea of essentialism, that richness in space and in life is proportional to the amount of superficiality we can do without, and what is truly meaningful can only be experienced slowly, in time passed.

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time

- T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday (1930)