during the design process, once we had settled on pursuing a formal investigation of 'home' as an iconic symbol,
we put a lot of effort into the proportioning of that representation. the study focused primarily on the hierarchical
relationship between the shed and the gable roofs (left and right) and the balance of what we saw as two stacked
volumes (the lower 'box' and the upper folded mass). all of this resulted in a roof ridge that peaked at 19' - one
foot above the 18' max for one-story construction - and a massive headache in dealing with the LA building
department. to keep the height we added 6" to the side yard (which we had already padded with 6"), meeting the
requirements for a two-story construction.
everything seemed ok until an inspector showed up to inspect the formwork for the footings, didn't have enough
to do, and requested a survey. the lot lines in venice are nearly a hundred years old, fences have gone up and
come down over the years, vegetation tends to run wild, and the city doesn't maintain markers. in other words,
property lines are fuzzy. especially these particular lines which run at a variety of angles, none of which are
parallel to the existing house (which isn't even parallel to itself). despite the extra foot we added to the side yard
for our roof ridge in our one-story construction, the inspector determined that, due to the angle of the property
line, the back corner of the footings dug by the contractor was 3" too close to that line. for a one-story
construction like ours, that is still 9" of extra side yard.
but since logical reasoning is apparently absent in the LADBS, we are required to either redo the formwork
(which the contractor doesn't want to do), get a variance from the neighbors and the city (which the client
doesn't want to do), or re-proportion the structure and redo the entire drawing set and resubmit to my
favorite plan checker, sai, with a roof ridge at 18' by the end of next week (which i don't want to do). guess who
lost the straw draw.
we knew lowering the roof ridge to 18' would make the overall form feel squat, so we decided to decrease
the height of the lower 'box' volume by 6" accordingly (meaning all of the windows would drop from 8' to 7'6").
the 1' drop also made it impossible to maintain a visual hierarchy between the gable and the shed, forcing us
to simplify the roof plane into a single folded sheet with 4 creases along two varied height edge lines (18' and 8'6).
