A Lesson in Ephemeral Style
It is one of the ironies of our age: Immense technological change has liberated us from many of the confines of modern life, allowing us to live as nomadic an existence as old desert tribes. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that a designer who has spent decades trying to transform our banal physical environment would finally ask: What would it be like to live inside a Web site?
For Michael Jantzen, a conceptual artist, the puzzle began three years ago. He was cruising down Pacific Coast Highway on a glittering afternoon, grumbling to himself about the characterless houses that blocked his view of the Pacific. The answer seemed obvious: render the houses invisible, or at least give the illusion that they aren’t there. He drove back to his studio in El Segundo and sketched out the Malibu Video Beach House, a home that--like most of Jantzen’s designs--makes Bill Gates’ tech-obsessed mansion in the Seattle suburbs seem mundane.
This house has exterior walls that have thin, high-resolution screens on which real-time video tracks display, in full scale, whatever is happening on the other side--surfers riding the waves, or gulls gliding atop the sea in the sunset. Looking at the wall is like looking right through the house.
Inside, a grid of mirrors reflects the beach scene into the living room. The floors are covered with sea sand, and the furniture is basic beach gear: folding chairs and a food cart. If you find dark skies dispiriting, the controls can be programmed to play a prerecorded sunny day. In addition to its street number on PCH, the Beach House would also have an Internet address, so anyone could log on to the Web and move in, virtually.
No matter that you might not want to live in a house with no comforting sense of enclosure. No matter, too, that the Beach House will probably never be built. For Jantzen, that is not the point. His creations are “consciousness-raising” exercises, he says, whose purpose is to challenge our assumptions about how we live, and to offer us an intriguing glimpse of the alternatives.
With no compulsion to have his designs built, Jantzen has allowed himself to create wild fantasies, a few of which now seem almost prosaic. Twenty-one years ago, Jantzen built a dome house in Illinois for himself and his wife Ellen, installed one of the first computers ever produced by Radio Shack and programmed it to play the sounds of the woods. It was a crude first attempt at using digital technology to change the reality inside, long before Gates commissioned his dream mansion. Each phase of Jantzen’s work has pushed against the prejudices and constraints of contemporary architecture: As far back as 1974, he was designing experimental solar-powered homes and greenhouses. Last year, he began designing an interactive theme park for the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he teaches environmental design and art. Not surprisingly, Jantzen admits that he has always struggled for financial security, despite his experiments’ turning heads among establishment designers. In 1982, when he was 34, U.S. News & World Report listed him as one of America’s young superachievers, and Popular Science magazine chose one of his alternative-energy building systems as one of the best new products of 1990.
One of the highest compliments he gets is: “I never thought of it that way,” says Jantzen, now 51.
It would, indeed, be hard to have thought up many of Jantzen’s creations. They are whimsical in the extreme, with a quirky sense of humor, such as the giant DNA model that he designed for children to climb on outside the University of California’s Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley. The computer renderings and plastic models scattered around the office in his apartment are an eclectic jumble of recreational parks, retail shops, homes and undefinable sculpture Jantzen calls “livable form.” Some housing designs are confounding, and occasionally nonsensical, while others have an ethereal delicacy.
The problem with most houses, Jantzen says, is that architects assume we want to continue living the way we do. “Housing has been stuck in a rut for many, many years,” he says. “Most houses tend to be more about history than about new ideas.” Instead, he insists on trying to create a “new reality,” a quest that led to his work being exhibited last month at the opening of the Santa Fe Art Institute’s new complex. “The houses we live in work pretty well,” says institute director Kerry Benson. “But Mike is always pushing the envelope, and I really like that.”
Jantzen began experimenting when he was 11, building structures on a rambling 50-acre fishing resort that his parents ran near Carlyle, Ill. “Then I started making conventional wood carvings,” he says. “I got very good at it, and very bored with it.” Next came abstract wood-and-clay sculptures, which steadily grew in size, until he was building pieces of art large enough to live in.
From the start, his houses were geared to a survivalist self-sufficiency, using alternative energy, many of them linked to greenhouses in which one could grow organic vegetables. Influenced by the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller, Jantzen designed several dome houses, one of which, in 1982, he built for his parents. The four-dome building, which “looks like soap bubbles,” was constructed by slicing off the rounded tops of grain silos, a common item on the farms in the surrounding area. Jantzen designed the house as a prototype, hoping that the silo company would buy the model and mass-produce it. His parents continue to live in it, but the company changed ownership.
In fact, Jantzen admits that few people will risk money on buildings as experimental as his. For instance, for decades he has pondered what to do when we grow tired of our homes, and with Jantzen’s designs, there might never be a need to sell a house. Designed for maximum flexibility, the buildings he creates can change their shape, expand or shrink, or be picked up and moved like mobile homes.
The Ephemeral House, which he designed four years ago, is a circular structure anchored by radial panels, like a spider web. Set on tracks, its roofs and curved walls are both solid and glass, and are mounted on wheels and levers, allowing people to open and close them in multiple variations, changing the function and shape of the house as often as shifts in the weather.
Jantzen’s latest project, which he calls the M House, uses the same concept. Although constructed around two simple rectangles, the model, sitting on a table in the middle of his office, looks like a bizarre piece of origami, with 29 walkways and several folding roofs, which zigzag in different directions and can be slid on levers. “Even the work area and the bed can be rolled outdoors,” he says. “It merges outside and inside.”
As with all Jantzen’s houses, the M House relies on solar and wind power, and needs no hookup to utilities. Jantzen took the design to ASI Engineering in Santa Monica “to make sure it worked,” and has built most of it himself, storing it in pieces in two warehouses, while he finishes the rest in the garage under his apartment.
Years after Jantzen plugged the clunky Radio Shack computer into his living room, technology has finally begun to keep pace with his imagination. With new computerized systems, architects may at last break the mold of traditional design. But Jantzen fears they will use the new technology to create houses aimed solely at making existing lifestyles easier to manage. “I don’t want the computer to turn the lights on and off,” he says. “I want technology to educate and entertain me, not to turn me into a zombie.”
And so the Beach House is designed for multimedia entertainment, not just for its owners, but for those of us who drive by it. Then again, says Jantzen, you could switch off all the controls, and simply live “in a glass house on the beach.” But that would be far too much like normal life.