Architecture: A Case Study of Our House

Under construction on land reclaimed from the kudzu.

I try to keep learning all the time. When I periodically pick up For an Architecture of Reality it always reminds me that I am learning my own tenets, and practicing them. To never begin with meaning (it will come). To dare to reveal. To dream out loud.

I took these lessons to heart with the one who has become the love of my life, and we built a house in 2001. We still live in it: it has grown right along with our family, slowly revealing its qualities year after year. It is small and big. Plain yet quirky. Inside defers to outside sometimes. Quiet and loud. Present and at times, an absence of presence. These are different tenets than Benedikt’s, but perhaps his are folded in there somewhere. Just being alive here has guaranteed meaning in our lives.

The inspiration for the design was an osmosis of places and times in our lives: intimate courtyards and rooms in Biot, France; imagined gardens green and wet with rain, cut flowers for the table; a nest, basically. The end result represents the moment where the design process had to end, pencils down, time is up: the wondering iterations had to stop if there was going to be a house to inhabit.

Our courtyard inspiration from our stay in Biot, France.

Courtyard Gate to our patio in Biot.

Walls and hillside in matching stone. Biot, France.

I see exaggerations in the design now: pushing the house to the north too emphatically to fit a courtyard to the south on the land’s skinny width; the house plan pulled long like taffy on the 460’ long lot; the rhombus of a studio above the garage: a square would not do. We are not square!

Sketchbook studies: Plan pieces.

Sketchbook studies: Plan never far from Form. Fish /City duality is interesting…

Sketchbook studies: The house in Section and words…

Sketchbook study: Pushing the house to make room for the courtyard.

And the folding, pliable form of the house: as if the design actions remain as evident motions in the architecture, with nothing smoothed over, regularized, made more efficient. Trapezoidal bedrooms should be fine, surely…

Inspiration: Peter Eisenman study for Housing Project in Germany, 1993. Folding the Pliant. This was where my theoretical head was at in the 90s.

Sketchup massing model of the house.

I had of course studied Ray and Charles Eames’ Case Study House in California in school: an artistic couple building a steel frame house with the post-WW2 industrial materials. The big bright breath of that living room. Studios for each of them to create. A breezeway between the two boxy frames.

Their house was not a precedent for me. But look at the similarities! The plans and sections of the two houses share thought-DNA, surely. How could I not recognize this back then?

Top: Our First Floor Plan: Big living room facing the woods.

Bottom: Our Second Floor Plan: All three bedrooms, an office, a Studio.

Eames’ House plans; Top is Second Floor.

Bottom: Eames’ First Floor Plan.

Site Section showing the Living Room stepping down the slope.

Eames House, Site Section below and Elevation above.

View of our house from the back, towards the courtyard.

View of the Eames house, from the back.

Our house as Google sees it.

Our house as Instagram sees it.

The house will have to grow with us, age with us, evolve with us. We may need that garage to become a studio apartment: we never thought about needing a master-on-main when we were 32. The roof is presciently ready for solar panels, and that combined with a couple Tesla batteries could keep us off the grid. It won’t be the easiest house to retrain, with its intransigent geometry and indie 21st-century origins, but we’ll keep folding ideas into it gently, like a cake batter, and bake them into our future.