Dream House or Neighborhood Blight? : Architecture: Dwain Lind is crafting every bit of his La Loma Road residence himself--and has been for the last 14 years. Neighbors say enough already.

He likes it when possums stroll into his living room. They “wrinkle their noses” at him.

Ask him if he’s playing Robinson Crusoe in Pasadena, and he’ll take a low bow.

Like a shipwrecked islander, architect Dwain Lind has spent the last 14 years living in an unfinished house he is building himself.

For Lind, 57, a former instructor at the Art Center School of Design in Pasadena, the house at 1550 La Loma Road is more than just a home. It’s a profound artistic experience, “a sculpture,” he said with pride. It’s a manifestation of philosophical beliefs.

“Building the house and living in it at the same time liberates me,” he said. “And doing it right takes time. It took an entire summer just to weld and solder the sheet-metal edging on the roof.”

But the project has stirred resentment among some of Lind’s neighbors in southwest Pasadena, who complain that unsightly construction materials are often visible and that Lind, until he was recently ordered to complete his driveway, used to park his car in front of their homes.

“He calls it a house, a work of art. I don’t even see a house,” said Lola Abernathy, 72, who lives next door. “I think he’s delaying building because he hasn’t any money.”

Lind concedes that he has never applied for a significant loan. He wants to pay as he goes so he knows the house is truly his. “Most people who build a house spend 30 to 35 years paying it off. They don’t own it,” he said. “Me, I’ve been building a house for 20 to 25 years, but it’s totally mine.”

Lind says Abernathy’s complaints are personal. The two have feuded over her German shepherd and his eucalyptus leaves.

Brian McCarty, 38, a motion picture sound technician who lives up the street, sees Lind as “eccentric--a kind of a free spirit, who’s content to live in the conditions he’s been living in.”

But McCarty has complained to the city several times. He wants the city to order Lind to complete the house right away. But when McCarty took his complaints to the City Council at a meeting last July, several residents spoke on Lind’s behalf.

“It has never interfered with how the neighborhood looks,” said Barbara Grady, 50, a neighbor who, with her husband, has hired Lind on occasion for remodeling jobs.

Until now, Pasadena has placed no time limit on construction. McCarty learned that Lind has been operating within city rules. Now McCarty’s gripe is as much against the city as against Lind.

“Once he was granted occupancy,” McCarty said, “the work pretty much came to a halt. Until the city reports to the county assessor that the property is complete, (Lind) is paying taxes on the appraised value of the vacant lot made 20 years ago. So it’s in his interest never to complete the house. Under the present rules, such projects can keep going forever.”

William Schlecht, administrator of the city’s building and development services, confirmed that Lind’s building permit was issued in about 1970 and “is good as long as work is being done.”

But the department is developing a code change that would put time limits on future construction.

Originally, Lind said, he did not intend the house to be a do-it-yourself project. He expected to use contractors, but when one contractor began putting together some concrete blocks in a way that countered Lind’s instructions, Lind fired him and took over.

“He refused to pour concrete on the back of the blocks because they were for a wall that wouldn’t show,” Lind said. “I know the back is there. For me, it’s a matter of pride.”

A single man, Lind moved in when the house was about 10% complete and stayed ever since.

The house, as it is taking shape, is an intricately crafted, split-level affair of atypical construction. In an ordinary two-story house, Lind explained, the studs form a structure that requires the bearing walls of the upper story to line up with the walls below. Instead of studs, Lind uses cantilevered timbers in which the beams--some as much as 6 feet thick--become the floor of the area above.

He explained that with this method, upstairs-downstairs rooms needn’t be vertically aligned, and therefore can be of different dimensions. “My design is functional and sparing,” he said.

Passersby would have to peer carefully through the densely foliated tree-lined street to glimpse Lind’s house. Up the driveway of dirt-filled, diamond-shaped forms, a visitor stands in a sort of large, exposed vestibule, now partly covered, but whose only roof for a long while was the trunk of a fallen tree rooted in the hillside.

Soft, classical music plays in Lind’s studio bedroom, which has one glass wall and three of the masonry blocks that troubled the contractor. In a temporary adjoining kitchen-bath, the plumbing fixtures were designed and built by Lind. “I searched out bathroom fixtures and I couldn’t find anything that had the same design sense as the house,” he said.

From the vestibule, a narrow exterior stairway leads to the upper-level room, which has a raised platform area, a wood ceiling and glass walls--except for an open place in the rear that Lind intends to plant and leave as an exposed mound of earth. “It keeps the house cool,” he said.

For an even more natural effect, Lind cut holes that allow trees to grow through both stories of the house.

When the house is completed, which Lind expects will be in five or six years, it will have two bedrooms, a multipurpose room, a sun porch, kitchen and bathroom. “I actively work at it all the time,” he said. “It’s like every day, it’s different. It changes as I build it.”

Lind, who came to California from Minnesota in 1947, said he subscribes to the naturalist ideas of philosopher Henry David Thoreau and to the modernist Bauhaus school of design.

Lind began his career as an apprentice to noted Los Angeles architect Richard Neutra and calls himself a “master builder” rather than an architect.

“Most architects don’t know how to build anything,” he said. “Bauhaus believed in design and work, not in design and have built.”