ADD_ON    KARLSRUHE, GERMANY, 2006-2007 An addition to an existing building, ADD_ON is a permutation to a perfect representative of normalizing architecture: the German single-family detached house. It is located near Karlsruhe, in the South-West Rhein Area of Germany. The mathematical distribution pattern that generates normalizing architectural models is not coincidental but constructed by catalogs of building industry, construction norms, and society’s patterns of behavior, which form a continuous, rather slowly changing cycle. We wanted to test whether those established codes of normality in architecture could be challenged from within and made productive for design. The addition to an existing single-family home was the perfect case study, as it was able to permute the codes of its ‘role model’ and establish a dialogue with the existing. In order to meet the program of an extended living room, a terrace, a new garage and a new bedroom for the teenage daughter within a tight budget, we developed the spaces entirely from the normative codes and normalized building elements of the existing house: the pitched roof, the prefab window system and garage door, the building perimeter, and the existing openings in the West façade. The West façade’s existing windows were reused in the extension, while all other new windows were ordered from a roof window catalogue and “misplaced” also in the vertical walls. The roof shape developed from a series of manipulations of the existing pitched roof and the West façade’s openings, instead of being closed, push through, shape the new volume, and generate unexpected spaces and sights. Starting off with a familiar problem setting, we question familiarity by pushing the normative systems to their limits, aiming for an open process of flexible normalization. We are interested in both the individual technical, spatial, and aesthetic solutions generated as well as in the potential to establish a new order.