A step in the right direction?  

He said:
"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."
When we dislike something, and ink and space are free, it is all too tempting to "throw the book at it." Couldn't most of the architectural descriptions in the above paragraph be applied, with complete accuracy, to iconic modern building interiors which are universally praised in the design community (at least) ? Buildings by A Q Jones, R Neutra, E Saarinen, C Eames, etc etc have used the same devices in building which we like. There has to be a better way to dismiss an unfortunate construction, than this.
Of course, I may be making an incorrect assumption; perhaps the writer is no fan of modernist architecture, of any stripe. . .?

SDR...
I was highly specific about what was wrong to avoid the kind of counter criticism you proffer.
The answer to your question is: no. The legitimately exceptional modernist buildings (and even most of the less illustrious good ones) in no way systematically violate the philosophy of modernist design, nor do they resort to trivial thematics as criteria for ordering their design choices IMHO.
Inflation, inversion and gargantuanism are the antithesis of most modernist work. Modernist houses may be too public (The Glass House) in terms of having glass walls, but they do not look like public buildings for the most part (certainly none of Wright's functionalist modern ones do, but even Kahn and so forth made houses that looked and felt like human residences inside and out, rather than airport concourses).
Inverted massing in brutalism was a rather ghastly phase of modernity that apology needs to be made for. But inverted massing beyond brutalist work, whether employed effectively, or not, had the rational purpose of trying to emphasize delineation of space and its lightness for some very good reasons. When working with poured concrete, and/or steel frame, or even cement block, the tendancy toward oppressive heaviness (in fact, or in appearance, or both) benefitted from being counteracted. Emphasis on space, and deemphasis of massing, plus the creation of a sense of neutral bouyancy, created a visually pleasing unity of construction.
In short, modernist architecture, even much of the most humble of it, unlike this collosal piece of junk, evidenced unity of design in form, inner structure, and purpose that is systematically lacking in this building.
The key to all innovation in design is not doing something different and de-constructed, it is to find a way do something better that is also unified.
The house pictured here, the one that started this thread, is a post child for the new barbarism that afflicts our society. I could envision ways of trying to do what this house aspires to do, but it would require a rigorous philosophical underpinning and vastly more talent than this architect possessed in order to achieve it.
Modernist architecture descended eventually into post modernism and barbarism.
This house, to the extent that it individuates from post modernism, originates entirely in barbarism.
I had to live through the last ten years of ascendant barbarism in America to really appreciate the implications of it, even in someways to recognize it when I see it hideous face. But make no mistake. This is the face of the new barbarism.
And if we don't oppose it, we will will be inundated with it.
I don't find anything at all fuzzy about the means or intent of my criticism.
If anything, I am a canary in a mine shaft and I smell gas.
Gas may not be concrete, but it is very real.

I might quote Kubler...
loosely, but in his book (early sixties):"the shape of time", he stated something that is relevant I think to this discussion. He wrote that nothing that is human made is un-attractive, simply because it takes an effort to make it and the effort would not be worth it if the end result was not somehow attractive to the person that made it. So, the question we have to ask ourselves is not "is it attractive?" but "what are the reasons why the people behind this project find this attractive?" I fear that those reasons are indeed more related to the barbaric end of human nature, than to the civilized part of it.

Some scholars these days try...
to combine Jung's notions of archetypes and collective unconsciousness with paleontologist (and Jesuit priest) Teilhard de Chardin's notions of evolution.
They say archetypes and the collective unconsciousness evolve. It is a more momentous insight than some might at first appreciate. The philosophy, pyschology, and the cognitive sciences have long labored under the idea that archetypes at least were long lasting fixed points one could sort of hang on to as rather immutable benchmarks in the psychic wilderness. Now, perhaps they they are not.
Why do I relate this bit of pychic arcanity in the context of this discussion of this unfortunate house and my (and apparently your) concern that it evidences a taste for barbarism?
First, it occurs to me that if archetypes and the collective unconsciousness were to evolve as some propose, then works of literature, art, architecture, design, games and entertainments that manifest archetypes (i.e., images and mythologies) that seem to tap into (or emerge out of) a collective unconsciousness (i.e., a regime of images and mythologies) and seem to exhibit occassional synchronicities (several gaining the same insights at once), might logically be said to be evolutionary indicators of drift toward enlightenment, or barbarism.
Most discussions of evolution deal with genetic drift through an environment that takes a long time. Thus, we are pre-conditioned to think of evolution as a slow process.
But there are forms of evolution biologists can point empirically to that occur in just a few generations of certain living things.

continued...
And if archetypes and the collective unconsciousness were themselves subject to evolutionary process, these might evolve either quite slowly (persisting as ancient archetypes in the dreams of thousands of human generations) or quite rapidly (tipping points and paradigm shifts in thought and dream) as well.
Again, what has this all to do with an ugly house and what I perceive as a recent high tide of barbarism in my society?
Well, just as humans are able to intervene in evolution of living things intentionally, or by accident, (e.g., extincting certain species, causing others to grow dependant on human society for existence, breeding and genetically modifying others for domestication and so on) archetypes and the collective unconsciousness are also conceivably subject to similar control.
Which is a long way of saying we can assert with some probability that archetypes and the collective unconsciousness are things that not only shape us, but which we shape; i.e., there is feed back between us and our archetypes and collective unconsciousness, as well as between them and the environment itself.
Evolving archetypes and collective unconsciousness suggest a work of architecture like this house does not just emerge entirely arbitrarily out of the imagination of one architect and one client. It does not just anchor into deep and ancient archetypes persisting into present. Rather it is also emerging out of the evolving archetypes and collective unconsciousness operating on us all and that we are feeding back into, and that are being selected in and out by environmental circumstance.
Further, it means that our responses to this house not only affect what will be thought of this house but also the mutation/selection in our minds that it represents.

continued...
It means that to some extent, our recent literature, art, architecture, design, games and entertainments should be quite indicative of the status of recent cultural condition and its evolutionary drift.
And, finally, it means to me, that an evolutionary drift towards barbarism is not inevitable and not unescapable once encountered.
To master the obvious, if we resist barbarism, it will be resisted at the very profoundest levels of archetype and collective unconsciousness. If we carelessly embrace barbarism, it will be embraced at the profoundest levels of archetype and collective unconsciousness.
But great numbers of persons must recognize something before the archetype and collective unconsciousness indicating an evolutionary drift into, say, barbarism, can be resisted and redirected.
And once such barbarism, and its corresponding archetypes and collective unconsciousness, become institutionalized and normalized, as those invested in such drift tend to seek to do, it is enormously more difficult to root out, or redirect.
This is why I am so stridently critical of this house and the evolutionary path it portends. This house and the thinking behind it, the intentionally malicious disunity that it evidences, is a deconstructed barbarism to be concerned about, resisted, and directed away from, even if the architect is young and making an early mistake that he will later learn much from (a la Piano and the Pompidou) and transcend.
Undoing what this sort of architecture implies may be very costly indeed.
I am beginning to wonder if society should designate an uninhabited city called Mistakeville. It would be a place where all gifted architects would be allowed to go and build their first enormously misguided buildings, where the buildings would do no harm. Afterwards, these talented young architects could then begin the long, arduous process, as did Piano, of recovering the good sense apparently drummed out of them by our leading architecture schools.