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Merit Award in Architecture

Ontario Residence
Washington, DC

David Jameson Architect
General Contractor: PureForm Builders

The 4,600-square-foot Ontario Residence, a new row house
located on Ontario Place, NW, in Washington’s Adams Morgan
neighborhood, was designed by David Jameson, FAIA, with
Patrick McGowan as associate architect. Consisting of a main
residence on four levels with a basement-level apartment, the
Ontario Residence isn’t just a modern house—it’s an intellectually
subversive one.
For one thing, the house is an infill project that paradoxically
doesn’t appear to fill in very much of its site. The project occupies
a former 14-foot-wide gap between two groups of historic row
houses—a space that had long been used as a community garden
plot. But instead of placing the new residence’s front façade in line
with those of its neighbors, as traditional practice would suggest,
Jameson’s design pushes the house to the rear of the site, preserving
an open front area that can be viewed as a respectful memory of
the former garden plot. A wire-mesh screen across the front of the
site, meanwhile, symbolically maintains the building line along the
block, and in time can support a vertical garden, strengthening the
reference to the garden plot.
In a second subversive gesture, the wooden part of the
house’s front façade, clad in burned cypress siding, shifts abruptly
from one side of the property to the other, creating an enigmatically
sculptural form that departs radically from traditional row house
façade arrangements. As it rises up from the ground level, the
vaguely serpentine volume appears to struggle against the limits
imposed by the property’s two party walls, which are veiled in the
plot’s open front area behind smooth gray metal cladding. Large Front façade of the Ontario Residence. Photos © Paul Warchol
window walls on the first floor and basement levels heighten the
tension in the façade design by making the wood-clad form seem
top heavy—the upper floors of the house as a whole are more
massive and solid-looking than the lower levels supporting them.
Inside the house, the centrally located main stairway provides
a third surprising element. Viewed from the side, the stairway has
a commandingly monolithic presence that is in proportion with
the snake-like form on the front façade. In between the stairway’s
solid sidewalls, however, are perforated-metal treads and risers
that appear to dematerialize the structure for those moving from
floor to floor while allowing more light from above to pass down
through the house.
White walls, dark wood flooring, and minimalist detailing
complete an interior design that is pristine and monumental
without being overwhelming. The Ontario Residence is a study in
how a radically different design for a row house can nevertheless
be respectful of traditional adjoining houses and neighborhood
memories of how the site had previously been used.

The project was previously covered in the Winter 2016 issue
of ARCHITECTUREDC.

SIDE BY SIDE 69
Staircase.