07/30/2026
Introducing Courtyard House III (CH3) for RATHAUS / RATHAUS —an artist residence, workspace, and micro-cinema in Little Village Little Village, Detroit.
CH3 extends Dash Marshall’s Domestic Futures research into vernacular typologies, exploring how familiar forms can be reworked to project new futures. Neither simply a theater, arts institution, nor residence, it is conceived as a house for film.
The architecture transforms the gabled house, porch, courtyard, and living room into a cultural building that is intimate, useful, and civic. Three pitched-roof volumes rotate into a pinwheel around a central courtyard, creating what we call formal instability: the building never resolves into a single fixed image. From one angle, it appears low and stretched across the site; from another, it gathers into the familiar outline of a house.
The entry aligns with Little Village’s central axis through the Bridge House, extending the campus westward and reinforcing its cultural corridor. Rooted in the neighborhood’s scale, materials, and network of houses, gardens, studios, and gathering spaces, CH3 is designed to belong without disappearing—familiar in its parts, but singular as a whole.
The pinwheel plan brings the residence, screening room, gallery, kitchen, foyer, and courtyard into close relationship. Their adjacency supports focused work and informal encounter, while the courtyard becomes a garden, shared living room, and open-air cinema.
CH3 is more than a residence for filmmakers—a place where living, creating, and viewing are woven together.
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Architecture: Dash Marshall dashmarshall
Interior Design: PTD ptd
Structure: Atlantes
MEP: PA Collins
Audio Visual: LSTN LSTN Consultants
Interior Renderings: Bloom Images bloomimages
Exterior Renderings: Dash Marshall
