Title: Penland Core Fellows House
Location of Proejct: Penland, NC
Project Completion Date: Nov 2021
Firm Name: Louis Cherry Architecture

Short Description: The Core Fellows House is a residence for ten emerging artists who have a two year work-study fellowship at the Penland School of Craft in the mountains of North Carolina. The Core Fellows have an intensive and demanding schedule, serving as groundskeepers, cooks and handymen while also pursuing their own advancement in a nascent art career. The Core Fellows House is positioned on a secluded edge of the sprawling campus to provide a enclave of privacy and community for the young artists. The building form merges with the surrounding mountains.

Architect's Statement: The Penland School of Craft is an arts education campus set on a mountain top in a relatively remote area of the NC mountains. One of the important programs at the school is the highly competitive Core Fellows program which selects 10 emerging artists to serve a two year term working on campus while having free access to all the artist studio resources to advance their individual artistic pursuits. These young men and women are at Penland in a formative and pivotal time of their lives; and their experiences as part of the Core Fellows community tend to form lifelong bonds and life altering experiences.

The central planning concept for the Core Fellows House was to create the best possible balance of privacy and community. Depending on personality types and mood of the day a member may feel inclined to see and be seen, or to simply go into their room and be alone. The house is organized around a central living/dining/kitchen that is a place for socializing, watching movies, making dinner and all of the shared activities that the group may choose to participate with each other. Flanking the main living space are three clusters of bedrooms, each organized around a small lounge that provides a more private living space separate from the main social zone. The bedrooms are small and spartan with a bathroom shared by two individuals. Though almost identical in plan, each bedroom is unique due to the roof's asymmetric shape, which creates a differing ceiling height and shape in each bedroom. The kitchen is two full kitchens side by side to accommodate multiple meals being prepared simultaneously.

The building is designed with a post and beam timber frame structure. The roof is comprised of two floating planes that are each tilted on two axes so that these roof forms create complex asymmetrical shapes above a simple orthogonal floor plan. The roofs tilt up towards the central living space allowing for higher ceiling heights in the living area. The profile of the roof planes echos the shapes of the adjoining mountains.

The electrical usage for the facility s supplied by a photovoltaic solar field nearby. The heating system is a radiant floor powered by propane gas and the facility has no air conditioning, only natural ventilation and fans. The heating is assisted by a solar trombe wall on the south facing entry. The concrete mass wall receives direct solar exposure in the winter months and is covered with a matte black tessellated tile pattern. The tiles were designed and fabricated by Penland artist Ian Henderson and fabricated at the Kohler ceramic facility as part of the Arts/Industry program at Kohler Co.

The Penland Core Fellows House is situated on the campus of a school dedicated to the advancement of art and craft and, apropos to the school's mission, expresses and celebrates building design and craft. The traditional regional building system of the timer frame is used to make evident the buildings wood structure system and how each member of the system is connected and works together to support the roof planes. The unusual geometries underscore the expressive potential for a structural system and the shaping of space beneath a roof. The Penland Core House is conceived as a singular house rather than a dormitory. For the two years that its residents live in this house, it will be a home and a place for a family of kindred spirits and diverse personalities.