In the Petal House, Construction Materials Come Into Full Flower
The Petal House erupts out of a Westwood street like an urban bloom unfolding itself to the Southern California sun. Being a city kind of flora, it is not softly beautiful in the way you would expect a flower to be. Instead, this construction is covered with asphalt shingles, stucco and plywood. It is held together with metal rods, and its unseen heart, its pistil, is a Jacuzzi. The Petal House is a normal West Los Angeles house rearranged and brought into strange fruit.
Technically, the Petal House is a 1982 addition to a little single-story bungalow by the Santa Monica freeway at the corner of Midvale and Coventry avenues. You can still see the yellow stucco house: It forms the base for the gray asphalt-shingle-covered tower that has grown out of it, and you find echoes of its simple gabled forms throughout the compound of extra rooms, garages, guest houses and concrete block walls that now occupy the site. There is something disturbing about this proliferation of fragmented domestic forms that have not been disciplined by the usual symmetries or styles. The seemingly random placement of aluminum-framed windows strewn across the face is especially intriguing: It gives you hints of the lives inside the Petal House.
This house doesn’t hide its second story behind classical columns or as a Spanish veranda. It doesn’t try to fit in, even though it is not covered with any exotic materials. It proclaims itself as a seemingly happenstance collection of the stuff out of which houses are made, erected as it has been to fulfill the needs of a growing family.
There is a method to this small piece of residential madness. Architect Eric Owen Moss has worked very hard to make you aware of the materials that go into making houses by exposing the plywood that is usually hidden behind stucco and by using those steel rods, which usually just make poured concrete stronger, as balustrades. He has made you aware of the symmetry of the original house by marking it with a red stripe, so that you can see where it all comes apart. He has propped the addition up on a wooden leg, as if demonstrating what it takes to hold all these new spaces together. He has interrupted the wall around the property with little stepped gables, complete with windows.
Moss is playing games, and to many neighbors and critics those tricks have no place in the serious business of making homes for people. Moss justifies his work by pointing out how it reveals those parts of the city we usually don’t see, bringing out both the tensions and the happenstance beauties of the city while revealing the chaotic structures of our modern world.
Yet what delights me about the Petal House are the pieces themselves: the porch that is made of steel rods and wood posts, the place where you can see the bare plywood skin behind the bottom of the second floor addition, the rhythm of gabled outlines that collapse the space of the house into a collage of domesticity and the many other moments of pure compositional and material splendor. This is not just a mind game, but a real addition to the usually bland repertoire of houses. There is a lot of stuff here, and most of it pretty wonderful. You just have to accept it for what it is, rather than looking for a neat box to put back all the jumbled pieces.
The big move is the top of the house. Instead of closing itself off into a peak, the house opens up, as if worshiping the sun. Hidden within it is the Jacuzzi. The titled planes make the house look unfinished, unstable and full of possibility. They gesture to the nearby freeway and liberate this home from the closed-in feeling of the houses around it. It is a gesture of exuberant freedom. Like all such gestures, it is both offensive and thrilling. That’s what makes the Petal House a great little piece of architecture.
Aaron Betsky teaches and writes about architecture.
Petal House: 2828 Midvale Ave., West Los Angeles
Architect: Eric Owen Moss
