Crescent House

Klaus-Peter Gast

Description

Ken Shuttleworth’s Crescent House certainly makes an innovative contribution to recent housing construction. Shuttleworth’s design finds a completely new form that borrows from Modernism in its external image, in other words its degree of abstraction, colour scheme, combination of materials and detailing, but develops a totally new ground plan figure. A double crescent made up of circular geometries with different radii and centres opens up into a redesigned garden and green area that are also based on circular figures. The circular form is taken from historical and archaeological rudiments of the local landscape like Stonehenge, Avebury and Old Sarum, and ties the outside area and the building into their significant context associatively. The interpretative approach is indicated by the fact that a circle fragment, the multiply-shifting circle segment as a crescent, became the creative basis.

A small, newly planted wood of 1000 trees, of which 100 are maples, surrounds a circular clearing 100 metres in diameter, with the building arranged in its northwestern corner. The crescent radius of the building relates to another, smaller circle whose contour meets a line that dissects the main circle. So the house is fixed geometrically and spatially, and closely linked with nature. This is shown all the more clearly by the full glazing of the main living area of the inner crescent, in which all-day natural light plays the main part, harmonizing with the seasonally determined, changing natural colours. The outer crescent contains all the bed-, bath- and ancillary rooms, and provides a protective, windowless shield on the street side. Access is in a gap between the two figures in the form of a two-storey hall area, glazed at the top, opening up towards the living room and anchoring itself to the two zones there via a fireplace. The furniture is partly directed at this fireplace, but is otherwise placed freely in the spherical living room, while the bed- and bathrooms follow the radial arrangement entirely. This building is not demonstrating function optimization in the spirit of classical-purist functional building, but a prefigurative ground plan disposition based on sensual and spiritual values. It redefines the ‘house’ as a place to live that functions well, and binds living space and nature together uncommonly closely.