Kitchen chairs
Not exactly "modern" in the way most of us would approach the word. More "contemporary" with a little bit more class than that word normally connotes.
Other than that, over-scaled and over wrought. Instead of a living space the whole house becomes vignettes that would make Zhang Yimou jealous. Everything is self-indulgent stage dressing. This is beyond masturbation. This is doing it in a mirror whilst videoing yourself.
But I did like the kitchen chairs.
Overall, I dont like it
Especially in that setting. It is too pretentious. It doesnt belong in that neighborhood. Maybe on a beach, it might show better, but I still think that I wouldn't like it. Parts of the inside are palatable, but I dont like the wood staircase. It reminds me of a curved spine. I like the white staircase, but overall I think the house is hideous, especially the exterior.
-Opinion from a design addict who knows nothing about design.
After repeated looks
the only things I don't like are the completely inappropriate placement/setting, the cross and the wooden staircase. That staircase is pretty but the more you look at it the more it looks like an optical illusion. I drink waaaay too much wine to ever have that nightmare in my house. I'd break my neck.
I may be the only one but I'm swooning over that giant rock transformed into a kitchen island. Doesn't anybody else think it is groovy?
That rock...
...is probably the only thing that makes me look at the pictures from time to time. It would be a nice thing to do outdoors. just slice off the top of a large rock and polish it. I think it would be a nice didactical experience, lke floating around in a boat with a glass bottom....a kind of window into the fascinating structure of rocks.
That house could have its own zip code!
I don't know I just think it's too much, maybe it's because I cannot picture myself living in something like that. But it does have some natural elements I'd incorporate in a smaller scale. I'd prefer something like this...
http://www.modernsandiego.com/HomerDelawie.html
Eeew ick
It's not modern. Perhaps 'contemporary'. It isn't particularly clever or surprising or even amusing. It's just LOOK AT ME - SEE WHAT I CAN DO like that annoying character on Mad-TV. In 10 years it will look dated and in 20 someone will buy the property for the location and tear this mess down.
What philosophy determined/informed this house?!
None!
This is a thoroughly terrible piece of work.
Much money and considerable skill has been wasted on sophomoric themes of inflation, inversion and juxtaposition.
This is how a shallow thinker responds to his world's circumstances. Instead of transcending circumstance with an architectural unity of form, internal structure, and purpose, an effort is made to create a metaphor for the inflated, inverted, and juxtaposed forces at play in the world.
On a superficial level, the architect is holding a mirror up to the world and saying, "See, here you are you hideously contrived, inflated, topsy-turvy, and jarringly juxtaposed world. I have expressed your sort of contrivance in the composition of this house."
But this is ALWAYS the response of second rate minds...to ape the forces of the world at any given time without fusing this mirroring to architectural unity and profundity.
Consider Gehry's Bilbao and Wright's Guggenheim as contrasts to this work. Both Bilbao and Guggenheim are metaphors for culture and art under assault by the forces of the world. Guggenheim is a fortification in the midst of a siege. Bilbao is what things look like after the siege has run its course. The excuse for Bilbao and Guggenheim is that culture and art really have been under siege and the metaphors each embody are actually valid to one extent or another.
continued...
But with this house there is no excuse in terms of the function/purpose of the house.
The family unit, or at least the household unit, is not being inflated, inverted, and juxtaposed in any meaningful sense. The building's form is disconnected from its inner structure and its purpose.
It is like looking at the work of a highly skilled child. Every form is exaggerated out of scale and every form is juxtaposed systematically, indicating the architect has an awareness of everything about architecture but its purpose.
The child says the world is not as I like it. I lack the powers of creativity, wisdom and skill to compose a profoundly unified solution to the problem of what is a house for this client in this disturbed world, so I am going to organize the building into a comment on inflation, inversion and juxtaposition. This is pathetic, however, skillful or "interesting" the execution is in certain parts of the edifice.
Look at the pictures. Inflation, inversion, juxtaposition everywhere. If floors usually look heavy, make the ceilings look heavy. If wood and earth tones usually go on the floor, invert them onto the ceilings. If spiral stairs are normally made of metal, make it out of wood. If spiral stairs are normally geometric structures, make this one biomorphic (a combination of a twisted tree and a twisted vertebral spinal section). If there is usually tile inside and concrete outside, reverse them. If wood sculpture is not considered bouyant, hang them suspended as if grand chunks of dung in a white, geometric colon. If kitchen is the origin of sustenance and life and consumption, turn it into a sterile, lifeless place. There are living rooms that look like corporate offices/airport concourses. And so on.
Oh and there are the annoying juxtaposition of homages to the famous and to the anonymous. We get a really bad homage to Oscar Neimeyer's geometric modernist work on top of anonymous freeway ramp/parking structure architecture for the raised circulation areas. We have a Lautner Acapulco homage bumping up against an anonymous, rice curtain and teak religious space.
And ultimately, as someone above pointed out, there is the inversion of the house--the most private of buildings--into what appears a public structure.
Philosophy, philosophy, philosophy, people. Without it coherence in human endeavor cannot be focused into something regenerative. Without it, we are doomed to an endless stream of this crap!!!
Post Script: Oscar Niemeyer's museum is pictured twice above followed by John Lautner's Acapulco house. These are IMHO works driven by modernist philosophy, rather than sophmoric themes. They have problems. They can be argued to be a waste of resources, too. But they are coherent, and almost mysteriously profound in their impact.
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