A house after the Christchurch quakes. One creative home comes down, another goes up, the new silhouetting the old, reminding, resettling, providing lineage.

© Patrick Reynolds

Architects: Irving Smith Architects

Location: Lyttelton 8082, New Zealand

Architect In Charge: Jeremy Smith

Area: 182.0 m2

Project Year: 2015

Photographs: Patrick Reynolds

© Patrick Reynolds

A house after the Christchurch quakes. One creative home comes down, another goes up, the new silhouetting the old, reminding, resettling, providing lineage.

© Patrick Reynolds

© Patrick Reynolds

Where the former villa sat square and inward, the new layers out across the southern view, shaping to the silhouette for light, and framing a greater appreciation of the everyday. 
Floor Plans

Timber traces the silhouette of the old house, providing warmth, and privacy by opening and closing the view, finding sun and shelter on a south facing shadowed and exposed site, and layering ways in and out amongst its close neighbours. That the house is hard to recognise from afar, but remains open to its close community, is testament to the notion of resettling with surrounding context, ideas we exhibited at the 2015 Prague International Architecture Festival entitled Soft Architecture : Soft Con...