Rapson Redux

Designed by David O’Brien Wagner

with Jared Banks

Originally designed by Ralph Rapson, FAIA (1914 – 2008), the owners required additional living space and book storage for their 1960’s era home. They requested a thoughtful integration of interior space with the surrounding Japanese garden and a sensitive approach to the original architecture.

Linking an external garage to the original house allows for a library space to inhabit the footprint of the former garage. Inside the library, new fenestrations emphasize an initiate connection with the garden outside.

The new garage embraces a landscaped courtyard, allowing the entry sequence to unfold, thus revealing the link between the old and the new. The link – a glass void – gives visual connection from one garden to the next.

At the garage, a cedar rain screen presents an ordered skin that reinterprets the taut regularity of the home’s original tongue-and-groove redwood. Like the old siding, the cedar is untreated and will weather over time, uniting the new with the old.

Construction by Northstar Remodeling
Photographs by Troy Thies

Awards:
2012 AIA Honor Award
2011 AIA MN/Mpls.St.Paul Magazine RAVE Award

Publications:
Architecture MN, March/April 2013
Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, July 2011
StarTribune, October 2010

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