Problem
Courtyard palimpsest: A local business owner and his wife have purchased a hundred and twenty-five year old gatehouse, depicted to the right, in one of Pittsburgh’s nicest neighborhoods. We were planning to renovate the home until a tree fell on it and destroyed it just after the closing. Really, you can’t make these things up!
Yet we want to save as much of the existing building as we can. Old buildings form tangible connections to Pittsburgh’s history. Preserving these connections makes the experience of our city richer.
So what to do?
Strategy
Our plan is to save the stone walls of the old home – They represent old Pittsburgh at its best – and to fashion from within the old building outline 1) an exterior garden courtyard that preserves the outline of the old home and 2) an interior art gallery for the owner’s collection.
We demolished the existing windows and frames within the existing walls but left the openings as they were, providing peek-a-boo views to and from the court. The walls are ten foot high and should provide just the right amount of enclosure for the owners to have their privacy.
Then, we selectively demolished the rest of the home, which was basically torn beyond repair by the tree. Now that the site is cleared, we plan to build a new home on the site that relates in size and configuration to the existing homes up and down the street.
The Palimpsest
A “palimpsest” is a parchment on which partially visible, previously written text is visible. Palimpsests add the dimension of time to a document because a viewer can tell that first one thing happened, then another. This design is a palimpsest because once construction is complete, one will be able to see inn an instant that first there was an old home, then there were just the walls, and then there was a new structure.
Precisely preserving the site’s history makes the design much stronger. The owners are onboard!
Process
Where are we on this at the moment? Covid pricing has slowed our process: As of October, 2024, we’re trying to get the price down to where the owner needs to be. On our end, we’ve received the Building Permit and have braced the existing walls so they can hold themselves up.
Read more about our Old Meets New strategy in a speech we gave at the AIA National Convention.