3. MOTORWAY LIVING  A typical Edge Town house is a modular structure of concrete, steel mesh and soundproofing materials, and is built over a busy trunk road at a city-limit location. This elongated form consists of a series of chambers. At one end of the house is the main living area, a bunker-like space (chamber 1) protected from its harsh environment by thick concrete walls, soundproofing and air conditioning. At the other end of the house, a steel-mesh cage provides an exposed chamber above the busy carriageway (chamber 4). Sandwiched between these contrasting spaces, the sheltered and the exposed, are two partially enclosed chambers (chambers 2 and 3) – yard-like spaces which have some noise-shielding in their walls but are open to the sky. The orientation of the house perpendicular to the road, and the various degrees of its shielding, ensure that each compartment promotes a different kind of relationship – or interface – between the internal, private ‘home space’ of the house and its extreme environment. The air garden, a place totally exposed to weather and noise and exhaust fumes, is no domestic retreat, but it is perfect for watching the streaming lights of cars at night, or perhaps the burning wreckage of a crash at dusk. The transitional, semi-exposed chambers in the middle of the house provide quieter, wind-shielded vantage points with good views – up, of sky and cloud and aeroplane vapour trails; down, through the mesh flooring, of the embankment and the blurred sweep of traffic.  Building materials  Motorway house animation  Cluster of houses  View from the air garden  Roadside detail
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