repaired shop.

Image: Villa de Murph, by bldgs.

While searching around local neighborhoods for a project to call home (quite literally), an architecture firm duo, in Atlanta came across a dilapidated gem of an old repair shop. Their own little slice of gentrification, the duo transformed the repair shop into a live/work space with flexibility, comfortability, style, and honesty. Their design is a perfect mix of social space, design studio, and private area with stunningly intelligent adaptive reuse to boot. The parties that could be had with this pad...

I could just go on to tell the story and let images do most of the talking, but the architects (and inhabitants!) know it better themselves, and have already done the word work for me, and for you.

Image: Villa de Murph, by bldgs.

I started by driving around in the bad neighborhoods. Vacant lots, railroad lines, burned-out buildings. These are the industrial parts of the downtown, which still show the deep scars of a late-century urban flight. I was looking for something that nobody else wanted anymore. Something anonymous, something forgotten.

The building had been abandoned for seven years. It had always been, since 1947, an automotive electric parts warehouse. When the owner died in 1992, the family locked the door and moved out of the state. Since then, the roof had collapsed from the weight of standing water. It took me three months to track down the descendents of the owner, and when their agent showed up to meet me, I had to climb over the walls to get in.

Demolition took six months. One saw, one wheelbarrow, and five dumpsters. A dead forklift was dragged out by chains. 38,000 lbs. of steel starter gears were recycled.

I began with what was left: 4 windowless walls, a concrete slab, the roof joists, and the ever-present sky. And the three tracks of freight trains roaring by. The sounding of a train whistle is always the same: two long, one short, one very long.

Image: Villa de Murph, by New York Times.

Across the three freight train tracks, you approach the front door under a rusted canopy, 16 feet tall. Unknown to the street, inside is a private courtyard with a fireplace and a table for 18 friends. The paint, the rust, the decay - all is preserved.

Image: Villa de Murph, by bldgs.

Further on, the back wall of the courtyard is all glass. Eight doors make a window inside to the studio. These are the only doors in or out, and these doors serve as the single window for both spaces.

Image: Villa de Murph, by New York Times.

The studio is one room: 1000sf. Between the studio and the living area are two parallel walls. These walls are staggered and sliced by gaps filled with glass. The parallel walls hold three rooms: a kitchen, a utility room, and a shower room. When you wash dishes, when you do laundry, when you shower, the gaps in the walls frame views to the courtyard and beyond to the sky.

Image: Villa de Murph, by New York Times.

At the very back, the living area is 850sf. It holds a bed, two chairs, and a table. From the bed, through the gaps in the walls, you can keep your eye on the front door.

Except for the trains, it is very quiet at Villa de Murph. And with the skylights, the night is often as bright as the day.

Image: Villa de Murph, by bldgs.


Image: Villa de Murph - Plan View, by bldgs.

use of useless.

This fantastic work of space was an immediate inspiration of emotions and questions at first sight. Among the emotions, jealousy, of the young Belgian architectural firm duo that not only designed this (what to call it?), but get to work and live in it.

Once the first images came into focus and it's initial resemblence to the Zurich FREITAG Store fleeted, so appeared the realization of how wonderful the spacial transformation of useless to useful is here. A space, like so many similar in every city in the world, that almost certainly smelled like urine and had never seen colored light from anything but reflections from amber and green broken beer bottle fragments, had been transformed into something desirably livable (by some, at least). The story the designers of this space tell, is how irregularity of a site does not determine it unusable, no matter how irregular, just that those unwilling to use it don't know how to do so. One could assume that no realistic discussion of using this gap took place by anyone other than the two adjacent buildings, until sculp(IT) came along.

So, what to call this? It isn't quite a building, it's more than just a space, it isn't an just an office or a home. In a way, one could say that the owners are squatting on a piece of property, that they own. It seems that there are no walls, only boundaries created from usurped exterior concrete walls that have kept a roof over their neighbor's heads for all of these years. Just paint them white and call them yours.

Somewhere exists a vagrant pipe-dream of modern minimalist squatting. Prefabricated sets of steel ledgers and length-adjustable joists are given away or sold for minimal cost, in a package with a fold up re-usable roof, all bundled together like a tent. After hours, a small alley way, a drive-thru, or even one of those tight places between to buildings. Wedge your roof structure between two solid objects and move everyone you know in for a night, or until the police make you tear down and vacate.

This type of creative land use could be adopted in many more areas, especially where land is scarce and of course a high-priced commodity. It always seems that irregular properties like this embolden creative programs and design in general. If the majority of eyesore or useless urban/suburban gaps were transformed into useful and beautiful filler like this, this blogger would hope that all architectural philistine eyes attracted to their presence would lead to a brain that thinks of architecture in a whole different way.

All Photography by Luc Roymans, plan image by Sculp(it) Architecten.