issues have nullified that initial concept now that it has become a real house, we don’t know, but that was the original spatial intention. Tom:You are building this house in an established community and the city has an idea about what that established community is going to be. You have, in a sense, critiqued this idea. Andrew: The City’s position, giving them the benefit of the doubt, is to respect the context and the opinion of your neighbours. If you’re going to respect context in a knee-jerk way, and if you’re going to listen to your neighbours specifically and very clearly, they are going to say they want a traditional house, and generally the City defaults to that position. But the actual ARP guidelines for this particular community don’t have anything really specific. The City’s resistance is almost political, based on the fact that they don’t want to receive flack from the constituents if they let inappropriate architecture happen. So then there are two strategies: you can either respond politically, or you can respond by convincing them that the architecture is appropriate, which is what we did. We documented all the old stock modernist
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O n S ite review
T ransformations
I ssue 7 2002
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