Rypma Residence

Originally home to Turnholm & Larson Grocer, this ca. 1880 two-story, parti-wall building in Des Moines’ East Village is neighbor to a consortium of boutiques and downtown residences. This enclosure consists of the original building and two separate turn of the century additions that have been recently restored and brought up to code. Our charge was to convert the second level spaces into a single residential unit. Within these spaces we sought to shape a new sequence of areas associated with the occupants routine daily practices and, thereby, create conditions that cultivate a way of life that is spatially undivided. This spatial intercourse accommodates a distribution of ritualized modes that are interrelated.

Architecture, the artifact and its experience, holds eternal value when made in a genuine effort to contain the indices of its people. In the end, architecture is the re-presentation of the indexical mark of a people and its belongings. The living space for this situation was designed in direct response to the owner’s modest accumulation of personal effects and his, often temporary, domestic practices due to frequent cycling, fishing and mountain climbing tours outside the Midwest. As a result, spaces were allowed to converge and dissolve as necessary to support a gradient of material culture.

The building shell of this, previously vacant, warehouse space consisted of a redundant floor and ceiling assembly. The well, the sleep and the occasion are shaped in such a way as to preserve the nature of the raw warehouse space by exposing the existing wood floor and roof joist. These assemblies were simply cleaned and sealed leaving traces of paint, deterioration and distortion. The redundant floor and ceiling joist in the well were removed in effort to provide sectional diversity and negotiate the original elevation of the entry from the long since abandoned street stair.

The street entry stair hall has been refurbished only to the extent necessary in effort to reveal its original enclosure. The overhead landing is the site of an installation consisting of a single sheet of paper and candle wicking. This ‘blank’ staging is the invocation of the collective memory of repeated human celebration specific to this shared space.

The sleep borrows natural ventilation and daylight from the occasion at the north end through a set of double hung windows original to the third addition in the 1970’s. All windows at the extreme ends of the building were replaced with new insulated glass units. Cross ventilation is made possible by maintaining an open hall way throughout the entire length of the unit.

The chamber serves as a reception area and intercourses between the purely public and purely private spaces of this residential configuration. It is host to an heirloom quilt handed down to the owner from past generations. The rear stair off the chamber leads to the alley via a garage located beneath the occasion.

This inquiry into the spatial distribution of domestic practices along a 120-foot long urban ruin cultivated a genuine recognition, for both the authors and the resident, of inscribed spaces where our sense of occupation became fundamentally entwined with the fabric of time. The human being is capable of producing organized gestures, which is to say ritualized and codified patterns of movement, and, therefore, space within an existing set of confines. What has happened here is that, happily, a gestural space defined by a routine walk-through (whereby we negotiated an abandoned stair well opening, debris piles and masonry knock-outs from one addition to the other) has succeeded in mooring a mental space that informed the new configuration.

Note: This effort is the embodiment of a performance agenda that has to do with authenticating our comprehension of the corresponding items of experience through hands-on (design/build) production (of the housing, the table, the pan rack, and the bed), and thus, facilitates the collection of memories, anecdotes and rituals. Photographer: Cameron Campbell