Frame House I / Jespersen Nodtvedt

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Text description provided by the architects.Frame House I is a single-family house situated in the old part of Copenhagen's southern harbor, originally inhabited by the dockworkers. The area is characterized by an ensemble of small-scale buildings; workshops and living units of self-built houses and architectural experiments. The infill-house is tucked in between two existing buildings with three wooden frames spanning in between the neighboring houses. With a critical approach towards sustainability trends, the house is the office's first project to explore the idea of a structural frame system independent of the climate screen, doing so with a reinterpretation of a traditional Danish half-timbered house.The facade is mounted on a structural, self-bearing frame, allowing for future changes or replacements of facades due to renovation, change in function, or a desire for different window openings. After being prepared in the workshop, the bearing timber structure was assembled at full height within 2 days without the use of metal nails or screws. The timber joints vary according to the need of compression and tension forces, including both mortise and tenon joints, as well as embedded steel fittings attached with steel dowels to create a column free floor plan on the ground floor. The large windows are placed on the outside of the timber structure, giving the impression of looking directly through the wooden structure and out into the open air.To the north, the façade is enclosed towards the small road with, while the building opens towards its counter position with large windows and entrance to a small garden. The visible wooden structure is exposed throughout the house, from the outside through diagonal trusses through some of the smaller windows, or as a new layer behind the window frames in the larger window opens. Inside, the three wooden frames and its structural logic is a part of the spatial expression, either painted white or in the red nuances of Douglas-fir.