Domus Revisited

View from above

I got the idea of my new house design while listening to a podcast, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous: Houses and Villas at Pompeii, also available as a video, which is part of a course on Roman Architecture by Diana Kleiner from Yale University on iTune U.  In it she describes in detail the ruins of houses and villas in Pompeii which survived the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.  I was attracted to the simplicity of the ideal Roman House Plan (Domus Italica) which she attributed to the writing of a Roman architect, Vitruvius, who flourished in the 1st century BC.  I thought that the typical Domus house plan, which is essentially a house with an open courtyard (atrium), could easily be transplanted to an urban or suburban environment in today's world in a suitable climate.  Courtyard style houses were by no means invented by the Romans but can be found in many ancient cultures, including Islamic, Hindu, and Chinese civilizations. 

I have always been partial to this particular dwelling type, as you can tell from the several houses I designed and published on my blog, ever since my mother took me to visit my aunt's house in the countryside of southern Taiwan when I was little.  The house left a strong impression on me to this day.  It was a three-sided courtyard house consisting of a series of rooms wrapped around a large courtyard with openings connecting them to one another on the courtyard side of the rooms.  It housed three generations of two families, one on each wing, with the connecting side shared between them; the children and women of the two families, who were related, shared play and work in the open courtyard.  It seemed to me to be a very efficient arrangement of dwelling space, specially suited for the agricultural society where it existed. 

My design closely follows the arrangement of room-functions in the simple Domus Italica plan with a tripartite division of space facing the street -- two large public spaces, which were shop fronts in ancient Roman time, now a garage and an office or studio, flanking a narrow entryway in the middle.  After passing through the vestibule, one enters the main courtyard of the house, open to the sky, with a fountain in the middle, surrounded by a colonnaded porch.  A series of bedrooms and baths line the east side of the courtyard, with the utility room, a half bath, and the kitchen on the west.  The living/dinning room and the master bedroom are located on the south end of the courtyard which look into the garden in the back through another colonnaded porch.  The design as it is, a compact 2,340 S.F. house for two persons, can be implemented on a narrow urban lot -- a private oasis hidden behind tall walls.  It can easily be enlarged, if one so desires, by stretching it in the north-south or east-west direction, or both.  

Here are some renderings of the computer model I made of the design:   

North Elevation

South Elevation

East Elevation

West Elevation

Transverse Section looking North

Transverse Section looking South

Longitudinal Section looking East

Longitudinal Section looking West

Courtyard looking South

Courtyard looking East

Living-Dining Room

Kitchen

As usual, I made a walk-through animation of the exterior and interior of the house.  I still haven't perfected the techniques of making smooth animations, but you can at least get a sense of what it's like walking around the house inside and out.

Exterior Walk-through

Interior Walk-through