Shotgun House model.

Year: 2015

Unbuilt: Lexington, KY

Finalist: Competition Luigart Makers Spaces York Street Challenge

Duchamp Doors: Chicago Art Expo @ 6018 North: October 3-January 3, 2016

First Office Team: Andrew Atwood, Anna Neimark, David Eskenazi, Melissa Lee, Brooke Hair, Alex Spatzier

Duchamp Doors model video.

An art gallery and a domestic interior seem, at first, in direct conflict with one another. The former is usually public, modern and empty; the latter – more often private, vernacular and full of stuff. But upon a closer look at the typical architectural layouts of these plans, we realized that the two programs share one common principle. Both are composed of rooms in enfilade. There are no hallways as one moves through one room to the next and the next in either case.

Model’s Interior.

Shotgun House elevation oblique.

Our proposal takes advantage of this formal similarity. The Shotgun House and the Art Gallery coexist and reinforce one another. They share the enfilade plan, so it can be programmed according to the artist’s and the family’s needs. The home and the gallery open into one another to produce a continuous interior of rooms. But in an extreme case, they can also be locked off from one another and occupied simultaneously and independently. Both have their own front doors and linear circulation paths

Diagrammatic plans showing closed and open house.

Roof lid cracked open.

To construct the typical shotgun plan and gallery at the same time, the house is gutted and rebuilt with four internal walls. The three transverse walls divide the length of the interior into four equal parts: the workshop, bedroom, wet room, and community room from front to back. The longitudinal wall splits each room into two unequal parts: the large domestic programs on the South-Eastern side, and a long skinny gallery along the North-Western wall. A total of eight rooms are thus produced, not counting the bathroom, and each one is connected to all of its neighbors.

Shotgun House model in elevation alongside a long section.

Shotgun House interior rendering and plan.

As a result, every room has four openings, four paths of moving in and out of it. And in a typical gallery or museum layout, these openings would be left always open. They would be empty cuts in the wall. But because this is a house, and because a house requires private and separate spaces, or else it begins to be called a loft, our entry ways are designed to have doors. Now if we filled every opening with a door, there would be twenty doors in this one little house. It would be absurd!

First Office's Duchamp Doors in axonometric.

Photograph of the Door in the 11, rue Larrey apartment (Paris, 1927), Schwarz Gallery ed., 1963. Marcel Duchamp Exhibitions records, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library & Archives © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (2024).

Instead, every door spans between two door frames. As a door opens one room, it simultaneously and inadvertently closes another. There is a precedent for this double-door in a ready-made built by a carpenter according to instructions laid out by Marcel Duchamp in 1927. We adopted the same basic element and designed its structural and ornamental details to fit the standard parts of Shotgun House construction and decoration, easily acquired at a local harwarde store. These include standard two by four studs, door frames, baseboard, chair rail, and crown molding.

Duchamp Doors in elevation oblique.

Duchamp Doors model 1” = 1’ scale.

Beyond the details of the walls and the doors, we left the house plan blank whenever possible to provide for full flexibility. If you ask us, the perfect maker space is a white room with lots of electrical outlets. Someone may disagree about the color and decide to paint the room off-white. Paint is cheap and flexible. To create the same level of flexibility for the configuration of electrical outlets, we mounted the electrical conduit directly on the outside surfaces of the walls as opposed to burying them deep inside the walls. The building’s electrical infrastructure is not seen as something that is fixed. It does not govern the nature of the spaces. It does not limit the possibilities for the room. Instead, like color, the electrical configuration of the house can be altered and specified by a quick trip to a local hardware store. Surface mounted outlets and exposed conduit are not only practical and flexible, they are also beautiful. Like molding, they add lines and texture to the walls using the most mundane elements of a typical interior.

Front of House, Rendering.

Room Interior, Rendering.

Typically called molding, these elements are not just decorative they are also, of course, practical. They help span the gaps and bridge expansion joints necessary in typical light frame construction. The doorjamb detail is one place where the elastic qualities and flexible nature of domestic molding is of great benefit. The molding wraps the corner of the jamb and also folds in the corner of the room, making the double-door detail possible.

Construction details for the 2016 Chicago Art Expo.

Doorstop detail. Photography Carolina Murcia.

Doors Built by 6018 North. ©Murcia

We preserved the Shotgun House identity, reusing and maintaining as much of the original structure as possible. For environmental purposes, we have upgraded the windows and replaced the wall insulation, increasing the building’s thermal performance. The roof in the front and back has been extended to provide extended shading in the summer months while allowing heat and light to enter in the winter months. Perhaps the strangest part of it all is that now the house has two fronts: two porches, each with two front doors.

Shotgun House backside render.

CD for the 2016 Chicago Art Expo.