Borgitecture

Remember the Borg? From Star Trek?

The Borg were these part human-part machine things (and they were not good things). For example, they tried to take over Captain Picard:

Shame!

While recently checking out a Modern addition to a more traditional house at Modern Austin, the term "Borgitecture" came to mind: Assimilating the old into the new (whether you like it or not).

It's not an easy thing to do, and oftentimes (by our eyes) the results aren't good (to be fair, we believe making any addition, especially substantial ones, are difficult to do well). However, in the hands of a capable architect with the right source material, it can be done.

Here's the house I was looking at, a place that just came up for sale in Austin:

In my opinion, that doesn't do too bad fusing Modern to proto-bungalow. Nice job.

Here's another photo I came across of what I would consider a successful fusion:

The addition swings off the exiting house. Borglike, but perhaps a better Borg.

There are others that just (hmmmm....) don't do it for me. I call 'em ploppers: modern additions plopped next to or on top of the previous structure:

One common approach for modern additions is, well, let's call it mulletecture: Business in the front, party in the back.

In mulletecture, the house maintains its original street presence (important if the house is in a historic zone) but goes all spaceship in the back:

exhibit A:

exhibit B:

At one point, when we gave up on finding a lot we could afford (before we expanded our search radius), we considered adding onto our house:

The second story is the would-be addition...

Ultimately we couldn't do it. The designed addition didn't do it for us aesthetically, it wasn't moneying out (losing a bedroom to a staircase to add a bedroom and a bathroom), and we couldn't bring ourselves to do it to a 100+ year old house (as goofy as it sounds, we wanted to "honor" the house, the same reason we didn't want to scrape the house to build a new one).

In the end, as with pure modernism, the result has to be honest. Honest Borgitecture.

Does that even exist?