The Cul-de-Sac House

Abstract

The cul-de-sac is an omnipresent urban morphology encompassing an array of very different situations, whose specificity however is overshadowed by its functional definition. The research confronts the functional conception and challenges its appropriateness. It is firstly established that there is no one definition of a cul-de-sac, but rather that each case needs to be addressed through its own specificity. Secondly, to be able to analyze the character of a dead-end street, the interruption is not seen as a static state, but rather as a change in the urban dynamic, which then leads to thinking of the reason why this change happens, and how this change is consequently manifested in space. Having recognized the uniqueness of each cul-de-sac, the thesis looks into specific cases in the city of Almaty in Kazakhstan, where cul-de-sacs are to be found in the borders between different urban and natural conditions.
The analysed spatial characteristics of the urban cul-de-sacs are then used to design a house, as an architectural work where a higher level of specificity can be achieved. This design project is not an attempt to find the ONE cul-de-sac house, but rather an experiment in architectural design, where one term, or more specifically a manifold interpretation of a single term, is used to generate space. In this case, the interpretations of the cul-de-sac as the chosen term, are extracted from the cases in Almaty, using each case as a referent for the design of a corresponding house. The method followed for such an approach is a set of rules that determine the steps of design. With the first rules a level of abstraction is invoked, aiming to detach the architectural work from the urban reference, for it to gain its own identity; the design then goes through steps of further transformations, to then with the last rule, return to -the reference, be embedded in the corresponding context as an additional and last transformative stage.