FAKTURA
2022





“ Throughout their work... there exists a preoccupation with the boring. It is bringing the house down to the level of play, of the level of dumbness and making it interesting in the realm of pure engagement and use. The representation of the Shotgun House is done through its construction document set and a model. No renderings, or images exists [in the original set presented by First Office]. The totality of the house thus, in its conceptual and construction realms exist within the construction documents. The models built for the house also are working models which show how it will be put together.“

“ The material specificity thus becomes the explication and the meaning simultaneously. If wall in canonical architecture gathers differing meanings, for example, as a conceptual plane which demarcates space, as a vertical surface for elevation, the constituent corporeal sum of all its parts and pieces, as the extended column etc., then the shotgun house choses only a singular connotation for its elements. Multiple meanings are shed and instead a mereologically coherent constructional logic is adopted. The wall is the 2x6 stud, the sheathing, the paint layer, the screws, and the insulation in its totality. There is nothing more, just the constitutive parts. “


Analysis of First Office’s Shotgun House