Mid-century Modern Retrofit
Created as a prototype for single family urban housing by Serge Chermayeff, this home was updated by C&H to provide modern energy performance.
The house is composed of three single-story pavilions connected by a circulatory spine and enclosing open courtyards. The building envelope, comprised of 8″ minimally-insulated CMU, 2 1/2″ wood deck with 1/2″ of EPS and roof membrane, and large single-glazed aluminum-framed sliding doors, was a poster child for the bygone age of “electricity-too-cheap-to-meter”. This original shell had the stunningly low average R-value of 1.2 and was so leaky that the blower door was not able to get a reading.
Our clients had two goals that drove the design decisions: they wanted to flip the thermal performance from the bottom 1% to the top 1%, and they wanted to maintain Chermayeff’s original architectural expression. Achieving these goals in tandem provided some very difficult challenges to the design team. Luckily, these types of problems are some of our favorite to solve.
