Spatial Symphony

Architecture firm RT+Q designs a trio of houses that reads like siblings. While sharing similar traits, the ‘Case Study Houses’ also offer distinct personalities and experiences articulated through unique spatial and material dynamics.

- Luo Jingmei

Before Rene Tan, co-founder of architecture firm RT+Q, settled into architecture as a career choice, his first love was music. This shows in the way musical analogies pop up when he talks about his work. For a recently completed project – a row of three gabled-roof houses he names the ‘Case Study Houses’ – he says, “We saw them as an exploration of variations to a single theme (i.e., one theme, many variations; or one form, many variations). This likens to music, for example, the many variations of Paganini’s caprice no.24, where the likes of Brahms, Rachmaninov, Liszt, Lutoslawski, etc., all took a hand in writing variations.”

Those familiar with modern architecture would recall the original ‘Case Study Houses’, where architects such as Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Charles and Ray Eames and Pierre Koenig, to name a few, were called upon to design and build inexpensive and efficient model homes for United States’ post- World War Two residential housing explosion, sponsored and commissioned by Arts & Architecture magazine from 1945 to 1966.

While the three houses designed by RT+Q look nothing like their Modernist namesakes, they are still rooted in the same fundamental concept of exploring a common form or idea and expounding permutations and variations to the expressions of this form, says Melvin Keng, the architect in charge of this project.

He adds: “We sought to explore and study everything architecture: from numerous different ways of applying certain building elements, materials and down to the tectonics of architecture detailing.

The built result illustrates these studies (e.g., multiple solutions to sun-shading, multiple expressions of building edges, spatial variations, etc.). An opportunity of such exhaustive studies, at least till a certain point, would not have been possible with a single house commission.”