Framing a question

Architectural Review, The, July, 1994 by Barbara Lamprecht

The Los Angeles home designed by Sarah Graham and Mark Angelil for themselves successfully responds to a stubborn criticism of contemporary architecture: that it has abandoned construction in favour of a paper art of visual imagery, with architects as arbitrators of the facade. As Christian Norberg-Schulz wrote, 'A phenomenology of place ... has to comprise the basic modes of construction and their relationship to formal articulation. Meaning and character cannot be interpreted in purely formal or aesthetic terms, but are ... intimately connected with making.'(1)

The Experimental House seeks to subert the dictates of Southern California's default mode of construction for residential architecture: the fasttrack, low-level craftsmanship of nailed wood framing. Woking closely with structural engineer Michael Ishler, then of Ove Arup & Partners California, Angelil/Graham goad the idees recues of that building technology into an intense collaboration with the precise language of steel rigid frame tectonics, engendering a rich dialogue between the two contrasting systems.

The result is a compact yet open wooden box framed in steel. In some ways a descendent of the 1949 Eames House in Pacific Palisades, it echoes its progenitor not only in its spatial qualities of double-height volumes and minimal enclosure, but also in its dogged 'question authority' approach to building.

The project is sited near the Hollywood sign in one of the densely populated canyons that divide the city. The 156[m.sup.2] house rises out of a hillside so steep the site was considered unbuildable (and thus was more affordable; even so, site costs commanded half the $340,000 budget).

Local codes regarding setbacks dictated the building's position on the sharp slope; codes also ensured it would be a freestanding object with the garage embedded 10m below at street level. The building's height, however, was a design variable and imbues the two-storey structure with a position that rather tends to overpower the neighbouring houses.

The problematic site afforded a seismically robust strategy for the foundation. To minimise excavation, rather than sinking discrete footings and caissons to stabilise the hill, a series of evenly spaced stepped grade beams are tied together with three parallel retaining walls. This 'ladder' acts as a single unit grasping the hill. The roof, an elegant, sinewy lid floating above the box, is the design's most notable formal expression. Here engineering speaks as an exuberant art. Tapered steel beams, spanning the narrow 4.8m house at intervals corresponding to the grade beams below, pivot from a longitudinal steel beam in the front wall. This eccentrically balanced cantilever is held down by tension cables. The western orientation of the clerestory permits the last rays of daylight to play on the opposite interior wall; the hill itself protects the house from the western summer sun.

In a move that up-ends conventional logic, the architects chose to displace the location of the shear walls, ignoring the 10-foot structural grid created by roof beam/column/grade beam. This move accommodates more livable spatial divisions while allowing the last steel beam and column to float free of their role of enclosure. Inside, the sense of spaciousness is heightened because the heavily reinforced shear walls are punctured at the perimeter, permitting sweeping longitudinal views down the entire volume on both sides. Toward that end services such as stairs and bookcases are expressed in pop-out volumes that cantilever just beyond the building footprint.

Because of the tight budget, the architects opted for plywood and Douglas fir for external siding and trim; internal materials include birch plywood and particle board for flooring.

In this project the designers' stated goal was to make the architecture of the house 'dependent on upon the tectonics of its making'. For example, since the front wall is responsible for the roof load, a hybrid wood-and-steel frame is employed here and visually articulated; other walls are conventionally framed in wood. Structurally, redundancy is reduced and efficiency increased. Because of this dense interdependency of components -- the front wall was unstable until the roof was sheathed, the roof unstable until the shear walls were in -- the designers also learnt that the construction schedule had to be carefully designed so that the trades could work, not in sequence but in parallel.

Yet a sense of a disciplined dialogue among systems is not sustained throughout all aspects of the project. The fenestration -- in general treated as openings in walls -- is disappointing and seems haphazard, wonderful in some places and contributing little in others.

The building's relationship to the site also seems somewhat uneasy, even given that the anticipated lush planting of drought tolerant (and deer-proof) rosemary and bougainvillea have yet to mature and grow over the massive retaining walls. Although a huge glass sliding door and a glass garage door open to the terraces, there is a sense that the connection to the garden spaces is underplayed. Here, one does not so much embrace the outdoors as apprehend it.