Beach House Masterfully Mixes Sense of Structure and Freedom
From the road, the Ackerberg House in Malibu is just another blank wall, although a little more elegant than its neighbors.
But from the beach, the house is an exuberant mass of big windows that open to the view of the ocean. Holding together this beach palace is a tight grid of rational organization executed by the master of elegant modernism, architect Richard Meier.
Together with fellow New Yorker Charles Gwathmey, Meier invented the modern beach house. In the early 1960s, they adapted the white walls and open planning of modernist architecture to the carefree lifestyle of the Hamptons.
Although the abstractions and open-ended grids of modernism seemed frightening to most people in their normal homes, they seemed perfect for unstructured summer days. An architecture that was open to the sea and wind, that was as naked as the body on the beach and as pared down as a campsite, seemed just right for those empty sand dunes.
The style swept the country, eventually replacing, with forms that seemed all window and white, the cottages and their suburban, ranch-style updates that lined the beaches of Malibu. It was not until 1986 that Meier got a chance to bring the original to town (Gwathmey has yet to build here, though he is David Geffen’s house architect).
The architect of the Getty Center was given a typical Malibu problem; a lot stretching from the noise of the Pacific Coast Highway to the endless vistas of the Pacific, but hemmed in on either side by bulky neighbors, and a program for lavish parties and a big master bedroom.
His solution was to create a straight line running from a thick wall along the road, containing “service” functions (like the servants’ quarters), to a free-form living room and master bedroom opening out to the beach. Along the way, a small courtyard creates an inward focus for the house and lets light surround the rooms. The house becomes a series of spaces that undress themselves of walls and structure toward the beach, until the house falls apart into sunscreens casting expressive shadows on the undulating forms they shelter.
There is nothing remarkable about either this solution or the program, but the clarity with which it was carried out makes the house probably the best example of this kind of modernist exhibitionism. Meier plays a grid of white panels against a series of curving glass and stucco walls, accentuating the difference between the order of the structure and the freedom of the spaces.
The quality of execution (the owner ran a construction business in the Midwest) enhances the almost eerie perfection of the place: from the lap pool at the front of the house to the other side of the property, the grids march on, deviating no more than an eighth of an inch from their starting point.
The Ackerberg House shows that the combination of a great deal of money, a choice site and a very good architect can create a little oasis of the kind of freedom that designers have been promising us since the beginning of the century.
Of course, you and I may never get to enjoy that Shangri-La. Instead, we will have our drive down Pacific Coast Highway enriched by the most elegant blank wall this side of China, while our walk on the beach will be enlivened by the sculptural play of richly articulated forms gesturing at their own nirvana from above the high tide line of privacy.
Aaron Betsky, of West Hollywood, teaches and writes extensively about architecture.
Ackerberg House, 22466 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu
Architect: Richard Meier
The house is not open to the public.
