Loft Archaeology – Marpillero Pollak Architects

Erieta Attali’s 2018-2019 photographs of our loft inspired us to revisit the project through her eyes. We paired her photographs with photocollages, drawings and sketches that we produced during the construction of the loft in 2001-2002.

Between the eye of the photographer and the aspirations of the architects, we endeavor to bring to the surface how MPA’s values, visions, and decisions radically transformed this industrial space.

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Loft Archaeology

Gravity is the paradigm of architecture as an acknowledgment of the connection between body and space.

Yet, architecture is also enmeshed in time, as its fourth dimension alongside geometrical parameters. This is where the notion of “paradoxical tectonics” materializes, as a moment in which the tactile dimension of architectural experience encounters a suspension of time, challenging established body/mind correlations to open up the possibility of imaginary resonances at the psychological level.

The irruption of a suspended temporality is presented here as an architectural attribute of the project, complementing the sensibility for longer durations embedded in Erieta Attali’s interest for archeological investigations.

Small steel beam enters a large wood joist, to be supported by a recycled steel beam below

Large cut joists hang below a small steel beam that is cantilevered from a small steel post

The three structural diagrams focus on strategies of tectonic hybridization between the existing 1864 heavy timber joists and new steel beams and columns.

The displacement and reuse of existing timber joists opens up a language of hybridization between the 1860s technology of the industrial loft and the material performance of new elements, including secondary steel members, which play as structural role, as opposed to their conventional assignment as “ornamental” or “miscellaneous” metals.

Hanging steel beam supports large cut wood joists

In 2001, we started construction of our live-work loft. A May 2000 view of the lower level looking south shows the space prior to removal of a portion of first floor and 2/3 of the Rear Yard Extension. Attali’s photo from a similar vantage point conveys the radical opening up of this ground floor basement space.

Attali’s photo shows one instance in which the existing timber joists, are supported by a new hanging steel beam, to enable the cut out of the first floor above.

Opening up

Both Attali’s photograph and the 2001 photocollage focus on the layered threshold between working and living spaces. The open steel gate, coir mat floor, and translucent glass canopy mark the entrance to the loft’s domestic space. The canopy is the drafting table at Linda and Sandro’s mezzanine studio, above.

At this threshold, before the stairs to the lower level become visible, the loft opens up, surprising the visitor with its triple-height living space, 26’ high window, the garden, and the installation of mirrors and brightly colored translucent acrylic strips on the board formed concrete foundation of the neighbor’s building beyond.

At the left of the collage, one can see the open steel frames of the steps to the mezzanine, cantilevered from the vertical steel angles along the main stair down to the main living space.

Work/Live Threshold_Opening up

Our removal of portions of the first floor and Rear Yard Extension contributed to produce an airy, light-filled, inside outside space. Attali’s photo emphasizes the fundamental aspiration of the project, which was to introduce light into the depth of this unusually long ground-floor basement loft, including by setting back the big window in relation with the original brick party wall (right) that extends beyond the window to reach the new garden space, suspended above the subbasement yard.

The new steel beam, which supports existing timber joists, is resting on a single point and hanging at the other end. The joists face their original pockets in the brick party wall, above the ledge marking what was the basement level. Note in upper right of the collage the cut end of joists, as they make room for the main stair.

Excavation - Lightness

Within this hollowed-out, previously industrial space, the insertion of new elements is wrapped by displaced historical joists and joist hangers. This layering of the old onto the new delays perception to produce new sense, engaging the history of the 1864 loft in the context of its 21st century existence.

The mezzanine appears suspended in the full-height space. The displaced timber joists, cantilevered from displaced wrought iron joist hangers, support the open corner of the cube at the top and the subway grating walkway

Displacement - Wrapping

Paradoxical tectonics produces a moment of visceral engagement, in which one’s relationship with gravity, and the flow of time, are suspended, producing unconscious resonances that open up an imaginary register of perception, celebrating the potential for psychological discovery.

Attali’s photo emphasizes the pockets in the brick party wall as traces of the timber joists’ original location before being cut and displaced to wrap the insertion of the new volume—the cube. The displaced joists can be seen here in the treads of the main stair reaching the lower level, and as a system of double cantilevers at the mezzanine, from which hangs the subway grating walkway.

Paradoxical Tectonics

Attali’s photo, taken from the first floor, looking south, captures the shift in scale between the intimate master bedroom at the left, including its historical window, and the main living space, which brings the outside in. The suspended translucent panels at the railing in the foreground connect with the horizontal translucent glazing at the big window.

The thin steel posts of the railing resonate with the steel mullions of the big window, and the steel framing of the grating at the mezzanine above. These material and geometric affinities, transparencies and layering produce resonances that create continuities between the differently scaled spaces.

Shifting Scales

The reuse of existing wrought-iron joists hangers in an inverted position points to an approach to tectonics through the assemblage of “assisted readymades,” in which original elements are displaced and deployed in multiple dispositions.

One joist hanger, welded upside-down to a concealed steel column, (1) holds down the massive timber joist, with another “assisted” [grammar? Delete?] double joist hanger (2), supporting the joist from which the subway grating hangs (3). At the lower level, joist hangers perform a supplementary role as lighting fixtures(4)

The carved indentations in the timber joist displaced to become the mezzanine’s railing became the generator for the rhythm of the posts of the mezzanine.

The timber beam-railing works in concert with what are usually termed “miscellaneous metals,” which play a structural role in the architecture of the loft. These secondary structural elements include the posts of the railings at the first floor and mezzanine levels.

Assisted Readymades

The glazed master bathroom opens to the garden, brings natural light to what would typically be the darkest portion of the loft, acting as a hinge between inside and outside. Layered views in depth across the intimately-scaled master bedroom and the triple height living space give the sense of a phenomenal outside.

The reuse and transformation of one of the timber joists as the vanity counter--with cut-outs to accommodate the two round porcelain sinks--extends structural performance to the scale of the body, as part of an inside-outside material strategy for this space, including exposed existing brick, stucco walls, and an open teak deck floor.

Outside-Inside

The progression from the street to the garden, an extended linear path along the brick party wall, offers an experience of the loft’s depth through a system of thresholds. Attali’s frontal photo of the “house” stairs leading to the mezzanine reveals the treads as extensions of the bookshelf, in a layered assembly.

The similarities and differences between this bookshelf-stair on the interior face of the mezzanine’s virtual cube, and the bookshelf-stair at the cube’s exterior, facing towards the office, qualify these elements as apparatuses, in which the relationships between parts embrace their intertwined identities, establishing tensions between horizontal and vertical vectors of movement and materiality that extend beyond their physical boundaries.

Hybrid Assemblages

At the top of the house stair, one emerges onto the mezzanine overlook, as if putting feet to the void, suspended above the triple-height living space. The sudden shift in scale, amid the assembly of fragments, combine with a vertiginous sense of height, to produce a break in experience -- an encounter with sublimity.

At the center of Attali’s photo, a floating glass panel with no mullions operates as both guardrail and window towards the interior of the living space and the garden beyond, collapsing the transparent layers of the big window, the void, the railing, the walkway, and the stair.

Intimate Sublime

Tectonic Weave

Attali’s photograph focuses on the south edge of the mezzanine as it opens towards the triple-height living space, foregrounding the displaced timber joist that supports the subway grating walkway. The sketches propose accepting different historical components found on site as “readymades” to be assisted through recombination and a language of joinery, along the logic of a tectonic experimentation informed by their specific material and figural characteristics.

The resulting hybrids construct a layer of material and imaginary resonances that negotiate the distance between the historical loft space and the architecture of its insertions.

$13_Environmental Refraction$

The 26-foot high window maximizes natural light from the south, through the filigree of its thin steel mullions in between the two horizontal beams that hold the building together and frame the setback from the original rear yard extension. The big window extends the living room into a courtyard space and the garden’s constructed ground.

The big window performs a primary spatial role, opening not to a distant view, but towards the concrete and brick wall of the back of the adjacent building. At the back wall, an optical apparatus, made of semi-reflective surfaces and mirrors angled at 45 degrees, brings additional light into the depth of the loft, and provides views of the sky for a person descending the stairs.

Environmental Refraction

Looking into the loft from the garden, the lower level is a continuous space. Because the north wall of the kitchen is also the wall of the living room, elements support food preparation and culture in a way that is not kitchen-ish. Two six-foot long appliance garages built into the back wall substitute for the overhead cabinets that would typically be in a kitchen. The scale and transformability of the island, with its layered assemblage of heterogeneous salvaged elements, mediates between the kitchen and the living room.

Attali’s photo captures resonances between the cove-lit display of white vases at the top of the north wall, the salvaged glass case embedded in the island, and the cove lighting above the cabinetry to the right, layering the reflection of the garden mirrors on the big window in the foreground of the image.

Island Apparatus

See animation of kitchen Island opening sequence

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Loft Archaeology

The preceding pages have been organized as a sequence of filmic screenshots, suggesting an affinity with montage techniques rather than linear narratives and orthographic representation of the project. The role of time in architecture is presented either through documenting its process of actualization, or by connecting back to autographic studies at its conceptions.

Both these moments took place in the course of discovering new design opportunities within the real time set by exploring materials embedded in the existing space, and positing their possible relations with the new elements that were introduced during the process of construction.