Great Hall House Gainesville FL

Great Hall House Gainesville FL  

The original house was built in 1949 and was a modest two-bedroom frame structure on a generous site. The owners wanted to enlarge the house to accommodate the needs of the family. The site design strategy includes the reorientation of the main entry, construction of a masonry site wall along the north edge and creation of an exterior courtyard by the organization of the program into an “L” shape.  Each program section is expressed materially. The rectangular masonry block of the studio becomes a site element and the new bedrooms and reading room, clad in corrugated metal, emerge from the block wall. The heart of the interior space is a large family activity hall on the lower level with private rooms for sleeping overlooking the space.  The Great Hall is multilayered in plan and section. In the section, the site topography continues inside the large space and the Hall is itself a terraced landscape of interrelated private and public spaces.