Tower House

Abstract

This thesis is an architectural investigation of a house as a rational object imbued by memory. The place is a wooded hill on the border between a hundred acre farm and the marshy ravine of the Totopotomoy "Totomoy" Creek in Mechanicsville, Virginia. The farm dates back to the Civil War when the Totomoy was no man's land between Union and Confederate earth works. It has been farmed by my grandfather since the late 1940s. The house is a pair of rectangles separated by a stair. The concrete block walls are punctured by large windows, aligned to define interior passage and establishing clarity of spatial and formal relationships. The tower house is the reduction and rational manifestation of familial memory.