Tag Archives: HOUSE

JOURNAL ENTRIES FROM THE LIFE OF DESIGN

December 4, 2015

View of Los Angeles from my Hollywood Hills house

In designing a house for myself, the process became a diary of sorts. This design journey documented the chapters of my life.

In being my own client and in never actually implementing any construction, each proposed design captured my evolution over the years—from single, young couple, adulthood, married life, baby, to two children. All six design studies below (there are dozens more) addressed domesticity, views of the city, designing for a steep hill, adaptability, and new aesthetic ground.

Over fifteen years ago, I purchased a 1957 tear down in the Hollywood Hills, in an enclave of exclusive homes known as the Bird Streets. The following designs track my existence and evolution.

1998. Called the “Wrapping House,” this first scheme explored my joy of entertaining. The iconic loft combined the living room, dining room, kitchen, and other public functions into one space. A continuous walnut plank floor/wall/ceiling wrapped this great room.

The Wrapping House
The Wrapping House

2000. Then arrived a design entitled the “Glass Courtyard House.” My interest in hosting extended to the outdoors. A sizable courtyard was the canvas for socializing under the stars. A perimeter of glowing rooms embraced three sides of the exterior space. The open side faced the sparkling city lights below.

The Glass Courtyard House
The Glass Courtyard House

2002. I sought some privacy as I aged, wanting a distinct separation between the general living areas vs. the bedrooms. As I matured, I also chose not to brazenly demolish my Mid-Century house. With a parasitic idea called the “Floating Addition,” I created a polycarbonate and steel structure of bedrooms that hovered over the existing building.

The Floating Addition
The Floating Addition

2004. Furthering this notion that I desired both a public social life and a private personal life, the “Public/Private House” explored a home comprised of two abstract shapes. The glass and aluminum public building contained the kitchen, dining room, family room, and living room. The wood clad private building had the bedrooms, bathrooms and art studio. The simplicity of forms signified an agenda to simplify my increasingly busy life.

The Public/Private House
The Public/Private House

2005. Then came a baby. Two juxtaposed halves composed this “Adult/Child House”: sophisticated and serious for adults vs. whimsical and animated for the child. Luxurious with marble, stainless steel, and dark exotic woods, the adult half was intentionally strict. Playful with exposed ducts, the child half employed novel materials like colored rubber, bright acrylics, and translucent resins.

The Adult/Child House
The Adult/Child House

2012. With children, my growing family needed a bigger home, both inside and outside. Simply called “The Point,” I created a geometric house, with a double height rumpus room pointing towards downtown. With my daughters needing an exterior area to play, the rooftop amphitheater provided a zone for the young to imagine, with the surrounding tree tops as audience.

The Point
The Point

As in life, the creative process is not a closed loop—never a sentence with a period. Design and life are works in progress. They are open-ended acts. Ralph Waldo Emerson acknowledged, “Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole.”

2015. None of the above designs were implemented. I sold my property to a developer who has his own plans for a dream estate. In turn, I purchased yet another old house on yet another hillside property. Also with nice views. My design journey starts again.

EMBRACING THE HUMAN SPIRIT

September 24, 2015

National September 11 Memorial, New York, New York, by Michael Arad with PWP Landscape Architecture (photo by PWP Landscape Architecture)

Upon returning from the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, a colleague stated that she found the design dismal. I responded, “Maybe that is the point.”

The National September 11 Memorial & Museum is not exultant. It does not elate. As commemoration, the architecture honors the lives lost through acknowledging grief and pain. Through such, comes healing and the succinct message, “Never forget.”

In the mainstream of TV shows and magazines, architecture is merely thought of as designing homes. And indeed, architecture is a house.

But what can it house?

Besides housing families, architecture can collect memories, it can store beliefs, and it can sustain faith.

Chapel for the Air Force Village, San Antonio, Texas, by Poon Design (rendering by Amaya)
Chapel for the Air Force Village, San Antonio, Texas, by Poon Design (rendering by Amaya)

Whether the design of memorials or sacred structures such as shrines and temples, the architecture of spirituality informs. It influences and guides. Such architecture can be a celebration enlivening the human spirit, or it can be solemn, confronting the human spirit.

Here, when I speak of religion, I am referring to a belief system that might be a private personal agenda or a structured practice of an organization’s ethics. The architecture of religion then, offers spaces that contain an individual’s creed or a community’s doctrines. The resulting forms and materials from such architecture express conviction and devotion.

top: Holocaust and Human Rights Center, University of Maine at Augusta; bottom: River of Life Christian Church, Santa Clara, California, by Poon Design (renderings by Amaya)
top: Holocaust and Human Rights Center, University of Maine at Augusta; bottom: River of Life Christian Church, Santa Clara, California, by Poon Design (renderings by Amaya)

The design of a church for example can be flooded with natural light to express the revelry of faith. On the other hand, a church can be intentionally dark and somber, so as to make any form of light, say a single small sun beam, apparent and dramatic—representing the presence of a holy deity.

I previously wrote about my many years serving Buddhists as their select architect. For their national foundation, I designed places to worship and study, to retreat and meditate, and to gather and connect.

Contraband & Freedmen’s Cemetery and Memorial, Alexandria, Virginia, by Poon Design (rendering by Zemplinski)
Contraband & Freedmen’s Cemetery and Memorial, Alexandria, Virginia, by Poon Design (rendering by Zemplinski)

Poon Design has created spiritual spaces of all kinds. Just to name a few: a 140,000-square-foot manufacturing plant transformed into a church in California, a Holocaust and Human Rights library in Maine, and a cemetery and memorial park for the freed slaves in Virginia. Our other projects of remembrance include 9/11 in California, AIDS victims in Florida, and the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, D.C.

Whether a chapel designed for a retirement community of the Air Force in Texas, or a Massachusetts memorial designed for the victims of the Holocaust, my architecture can be engaged individually and intimately, or publicly and as a society.

Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, Washington, D.C., by Poon Design
Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, Washington, D.C., by Poon Design
© Poon Design Inc.