This was a student project by Benjamin Moody for Jon Rieke's course ARCH 2410 in Autumn 2017. This project was a design for a retreat house in Tennessee. We focused on piecing together fragments from historic houses into one cohesive design, located on a sloping site. For my design, I stretched the arches from the Thiepval Memorial by Edwin Lutyens, which became an axis to organize four other fragments, all pieces from homes designed by Richard Norman Shaw. From the arches, I created my own ruins of an ancient viaduct protruding from the hillside which could actually be inhabited with bedrooms and a place for parking on top, hence the viaduct. The massive piers of the viaduct continued into the underground organization of the house, becoming rooms, stair towers, and in one instant a completely hollow lightwell. This allowed light to pour into the partially subterranean living room and visually connected the underground, mostly public floor of the house to the more private floor of bedrooms almost fifty feet above. The other fragments became short walls poking through the ground, more ruins surrounding the viaduct, as well as organizing rooms underground.
