Bending Nature to Man’s Will

Now and then, architecture rekindles its fascination with the mythological Western landscape, the aura of rugged individualism and limitless energy. It is the America of the tinkerer, the inventor intent on shaping the world to his or her own design.

A house in North San Diego County exemplifies man’s desire to stake out his place in the world on his own terms. Designed by Daly, Genik, a small Santa Monica-based firm that epitomizes the current craze for mechanized structures and translucent skins, what the structure lacks as an architectural composition it makes up for in thoughtful exploration of man’s relationship to his environment. The design also raises provocative questions about architecture’s ability to grapple with the changing nature of the American family.

The house stands on the former site of a ranch house that burned in a 1996 brush fire. The owners, a retired chemical engineer and his wife, wanted a structure that would withstand nature’s violence. But they also wanted to accommodate the various needs of their extended family. The couple’s grown children, many of them academics, will use the house as a quiet retreat for study. At other times, the house will function as a place for large family gatherings, its hallways buzzing with the voices of grandchildren.

The house stands in a clearing on a hillside site, with magnificent views of mountains and the ocean. Designed in a U shape, its two bedroom wings project out toward the view and frame an interior courtyard and pool. The living area joins the two wings, with a massive concrete chimney that visually anchors the house to its site. Ripe, bushy trees, their branches heavy with fruit, stretch down to the bottom of the mountain. Above, a rocky, still slightly charred landscape reaches up to the crest of the hill.

At first, the house’s exterior shell appears aggressively defensive. Its low, blank facade--pierced by the occasional slot window--has a fortress-like feel. Its cladding of gray corrugated concrete board and glimmering aluminum shutters functions as a protective skin against the natural elements--fire, rain and the occasional curious coyote. Certain metaphors come to mind: survivalist cabins. Airstream trailer homes.

But fire, here, also means new beginnings--and the house literally unfolds to reveal the outside world. Six enormous panels made of corrugated aluminum and supported on lightweight aluminum frames function as giant mechanical shutters, with whirring motors that lift the panels up and down. When they are up, the brushed aluminum shimmers in the sun and provides shade for the outdoor spaces. When they are down, the gossamer-like screens act as subtle light filters. A similar system encloses the two bedroom wings, where 10-foot-long folding aluminum screens and sliding glass doors can be opened and shut to modulate light and air flow. The idea is to create an inhabitable machine that can be constantly reconfigured in response to the natural environment.

That notion--of a machine-like apparatus that can be tuned to the desires of its inhabitants--informs the house’s social organization as well. In the living area, guests can move hanging panels and fold open a Murphy bed to transform the office into a loft-like bedroom. In the bedroom wings, walls and screens slide open to connect interior rooms directly to the courtyard; partitions close off to create additional space for sleep or study. The idea is to provide varying degrees of privacy and intimacy, to allow for the changing needs--both psychological and practical--of the house’s inhabitants.

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During the first half of the century, such themes were commonplace in architecture. In Holland during the ‘20s, Gerrit Rietveld designed loft-like rooms that could be broken down into intimate sanctuaries. In 1948, Gregory Ain used sliding plywood partitions as an economical way to allow for various degrees of privacy in his Mar Vista development. Not coincidentally, several years ago Daly, Genik completed an addition to one of the best preserved of the Ain houses at Mar Vista--and their current design draws heavily on Ain’s bag of tricks.

But if architects such as Rietveld and Ain saw their designs as complex social organisms, many Modernists also believed in an almost Utopian balance between man and nature. The late Albert Frey built a 1964 house on a mountainside site in Palm Springs similar to that of the Daly, Genik house; Frey’s design is essentially a long glass box with a corrugated metal roof set lengthwise along the mountain’s face. A giant stone boulder breaks through the house’s back wall, dramatically separating living and sleeping areas. The house’s floor steps up along the side of the mountain to create a split-level dining and living room, and the roof slopes down slightly to echo the site. Frey powerfully evokes the collision of the man-made and the natural in the postindustrial world.

Daly, Genik’s design has a more awkward connection to its environment. Set gingerly on a large, blank concrete slab, it is too detached to meld with its landscape, too connected to produce the equally dramatic effect of an object floating precariously free of its setting. The two narrow slivers of garden that cross the courtyard are a feeble effort to draw the surrounding landscape into the composition. One can’t help longing for the grapefruit trees to reach right up to the house, or for the drama of the slope to somehow affect the rigid order of the plan. Instead, the trees stand somewhat sadly out of reach. The overall effect evokes another favorite Modernist image--the industrial shed.

The house is best, therefore, as an exploration of how architecture can begin to reflect the increasing elasticity of contemporary life. Whether the subject is elderly couples with extended families, children with multiple parents or the growing number of people living alone, architecture will have to invent new prototypes in tune with the shifting patterns of family life. Projects such as this remind us that architecture remains a social, as well as aesthetic, art.