6'3'' pride worldwide

Illusory Reality by Li Wei

Tamotsu Teshima - Hall for the Kyoei Wood Co, Miaki 2016. Photos © Masao Nishikawa.

Baptiste Radufe by Olivier Yoan, The Peak Hong Kong

Álvaro Siza Vieira - Casa Vieira De Castro (1994)

Fotos © Duccio Malagamba

Álvaro Siza Vieira - Casa Avelino Duarte (1981-1985)

Aamito Lagum in Harper’s Bazaar US, December 2016, photographed by Daniel Riera

moonlight for @calvinklein underwear by raf simons shot by willy vanderperre

Martin Conte photographed by Akihiro Furuya for Men’s Fudge

Will Chalker ph. John Hicks

Will Chalker, Andrew Cooper ph. John Hicks

MODERN HOUSE V: THE SPILLER RESIDENCE 

Filmmaker Jane Spiller hired Frank Gehry to design and build a house with a rental unit on a narrow lot in Venice in 1978. Completed in 1980, the structure comprises a rental apartment in the lower, front volume and the owner’s house in the more secluded, taller, rear volume. The Spiller Residence was featured in Architectural Record Houses in 1983.

Historically, the Spiller Residence stands between two major projects of Gehry’s early career, the radical rebuilding of his own Santa Monica house in 1977-78, and the Norton Residence, on the Venice Beach boardwalk, built in 1983-84. Although the Spiller Residence resembles its precursor and successor in its materials, modularity and west-coast non-conformism, the design neatens up the Santa Monica house’s jagged profile and refrains from eccentric scaling and loud chromatics of the Norton house. 

The stripped-down simplicity, clear volumes and lack of ornamentation, in fact, recall high modernism, which find its antithesis in the deliberate lack of finish at the level of construction and lack of closure on the conceptual level. Taken together the Spiller Residence design’s modernism and anti-modernism allegorize the house’s stylistic history and building process in a purely postmodern way.

The Spiller Residence is located at 39 Horizon Avenue, Venice CA.

THE MODERN HOUSE

1. Douglas House, Richard Meier 2. Esherick House, Louis Kahn 3. Vanna Venturi House, Robert Venturi 4. House VI, Peter Eisenmann

289. Alejandro Aravena /// Casa de la Escultora Francisca Cerda /// Santa Sofía de Lo Cañas, La Florida, Santiago, Chile /// 1997

OfHouses presents “Pritzkers’ First Houses”: The first in the retrospective look over the first houses built by the winners of the Pritzker Prize is Alejandro Aravena Mori’s (Pritzker 2016) house designed for the sculptor Francisca Cerda in 1997. According to Justin McGuirk’s article in Icon Magazine, Aravena’s first residential commission came at the right time for the 30 year old architect: Shortly after graduating in the early 1990s, following a succession of “shitty clients … restaurants, bars, shops”, he got so disillusioned that he quit architecture and opened a bar. “I lived by night, waking up at 5pm and going to bed at 10am,” he says. When he eventually decided to resume his career, he got lucky. A sculptor asked him to design her house (…). “I wanted to have that kind of freedom,” he recalls, “so I said, ‘Don’t pay me, but allow me to do whatever I want.’ I think I was rigorous enough, but it was still a completely stupid thing.” Elemental’s website doesn’t cover this project anymore. We don’t know if it’s because of the shitty pictures (taken by Aravena himself) or because the project simply doesn’t fit anymore in a chronology of works that now officially debuts with the more socially responsible (and equally exotic) design for a high school on Easter Island. (Photos: © Alejandro Aravena. Source: Via Arquitectura 11/2002, pp 88-91.)