NORM Residence is a minimal house located in Montreal, Canada, designed by Alain Carle Architecte. NORM is a renovation and expansion project for a single-family residence which breaks with the generic notion of this existing house, installed without real consideration with its context. Randomly located in the middle of a gently sloping lot facing south, the residence left the sunniest part of the land in the garage, while the living rooms were oriented north. From the outside, the arrangement of the volumes presented only a garage door from the street and left pedestrian access almost invisible from the street.

The new configuration of spaces now places the house in a more explicit relationship to the landscape. In its complete reversal of the program, it redefines a unified link in relation to different architectural volumes opening up to specific landscape components of the lot. The points of view from the new openings are now oriented on trees or specific natural sets, on the sky or the ground so as to look away from the neighborhood built nearby. The layout of the spaces thus gives the inhabitants a connection with the landscape in the broad sense and gives the house a quality of visual isolation from the neighboring buildings.

Photography by Félix Michaud