MEHR HOUSE

Real estate dominance is so vast that one has to answer this question: Why should such a house be renovated and not rebuilt? A typical home that is seen everywhere, and not only is it not that important, but it has also followed the very logic of maximizing exchange value itself, while neglecting the quality. The answer lies so evidently right in front of our eyes that we don’t see it: To live. In such houses, we can still see signs of resistance: a small yard, a share of the sky, and possibilities for spatial diversity. As an architect, you have two options: either you can reproduce profit spaces, or go back and strengthen these micro-resistances to restore lost spaces. All we look for is the latter: knowing the space, reducing its weaknesses, and adding to its strengths. We believe that this approach articulates the most important responsibilities of an architect in a renovation project.

Acknowledging these strengths and weaknesses became possible by spending time in the building and confronting the events. For example, a hole that is opened to escalate materials during the construction can reveal its ability to communicate between the spaces of the house and become a design element. In this way, we are not dealing with a linear design process, but with a transversal one. The renovation of Mehr House is the result of a set of ideas that are in cross-connection with each other, and what integrates these ideas into a coherent whole is nothing but everyday domestic life itself. The daily life that flows in three major domains: living with the ground, living with the sky, and living at home.

In living with the ground, we designed a private landscape by framing the super-small yard and its fig tree. Creating a basement yard also bestowed a part of the landscape on the basement. The basement in this house is a sculpting workshop, which has tried to enrich the quality of living with the earth by its connection with the yard on the one hand and with the rest of the house through the perforated staircase on the other hand. In living with the sky. The roof space became a yard that can accommodate life with the sky and compensate for the functional defect of the small yard. In many houses, including the one we are discussing, one issue can be seen as a weakness that has a direct impact on our life order: the decisive separation of spaces and their division between separate private and public areas. While looking at current life itself, there is a wide range of activities that can be placed in none, which is even more problematic in duplex houses, since the private and public spaces are separated even vertically. All the changes in spaces and structures aim to build a spectrum between the public and private areas of the house, which makes communication possible through light, sound, and vision, and at the same time provides residents with different functions.

Speaking of limits in the project, the facade could not be intervened on due to municipal laws and had to be preserved as it was. This problem, along with the small size of the plan, caused most of these vertical connections to be created in the cross-section of the building. Relationships that are organized more in dialogue with everyday concrete life than macro aesthetic orders.