Tag Archives: GRAVITY

#206: HOUSE OF LEAVES | AN ARCHITECTURAL READING

May 23, 2025

It’s not something I usually do—review a book, that is. Critically speaking, I wouldn’t call this a book review. It is more of an architectural observation. Reading and experiencing Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 debut novel, House of Leaves, is an encounter through space and time. Yes, a physical phenomenon—much more than simply turning pages.

House of Leaves, pages 144-145

Of this bestseller translated into numerous languages, Amazon states, “The mind-bending cult classic about a house that’s larger on the inside then on the outside. A masterpiece of horror and an astonishingly immersive, maze-like reading experience that redefines the boundaries of a novel.”

House of Leaves, pages 336-367

House of Leaves is difficult to summarize. More than a tale within a tale, it is a fictional story:

  • about a man, Johnny Truant,
  • who is reading an academic critique by a dead man named Zampano,
  • about an autobiographical documentary film, The Navidson Record, about a haunted house,
  • created by photojournalist, Will Navidson.

Sure, the fact that this book is about a house makes it inherently architectural, but the story explores many themes in the design lexicon, e.g., labyrinth, Piranesian space, Escher’s loops, size and scale, signifier/signified, palimpsest, material sampling, chiaroscuro, compression and contrast, zeitgeist, mazes, and so on.

House of Leaves, page 627

But it is the book’s graphic design that will confront the reader initially, starting simply with the word “house,” always printed in bright blue. The book’s design evolves from there with text in red but then crossed out, diverse fonts, a standard page of text vs. only one word per page, illegible paragraphs, upside down words, even music notation and Braille in graphic form. Several pages require the reader to turn the book in a spiraling pattern to read the words.

House of Leaves, pages 288-289

These graphic elements may appear at first indulgent, but they challenge the norms of book publishing and printing, testing the gravity of what we expect. Disorienting the reader, the presentation intensifies the terror of the story about inhabitants disappearing within the walls of a seemingly innocent small house. Within this home, hallways are miles long, a staircase descends forever, walking across a mere room can take days, and darkness is shiveringly cold. Yet on the exterior, the house is a conventional house. For example, page 122 reads, “It is not surprising then that when Holloway’s team finally begins the long trek back, they discover that the staircase is much farther away than they had anticipated, as if in their absence the distances had stretched.”

The tale is replete with footnotes, citations, interviews, and exhibits, all appearing rigorous and real (Stephen King, Jacques Derrida, Anne Rice, Stanley Kubrick, Hunter Thompson), but actually fictional. With the house suggested to be older than the Earth, I am enveloped, confronted even, with matters of risks, life and death, husband/wife love, family and children, obsession, ambition, fantasies and lastly, paranoia.

House of Leaves, pages 374-375

#192: “DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE”

August 30, 2024

Colby Residence, Los Angeles, California, by Poon Design (photo by Hunter Kerhart)

On July 25, 2024, I was interviewed for Josh Cooperman’s podcast, Convo by Design. About his forum, Josh explains, “A podcast dedicated to promoting the ideas of architects, artists, designers, tastemakers and those making a difference in the way we live. Design is personal as is a good conversation.”

At the Los Angeles showroom of Design Hardware, Josh introduced a thesis, “Architecture is an art form that also serves a primary function, that of shelter, workspace, centers for learning, social spaces and gathering places. This is a form of art with a language all its own.

“Long debated is which comes first: form or function? But that’s not quite the right question to be asking these days. A better question might be, for whom does architecture serve, and how can the space serve individual needs, both now and into the future.

Circle House, Three Lakes, Wisconsin, by Poon Design

“American society has learned to move to a new shelter space in the same way that a hermit crab moves to a new and bigger shell. We’re not hermit crabs, and this model has only served to increase costs and decrease availability of housing. Let’s think differently about how architecture can achieve different results.”

My edited responses to a few of Josh’s questions:

“Hi, my name is Anthony Poon. My architecture and design company is Poon Design Inc. We are awarding-winning architects and designers. We design houses. We design schools, religious projects, commercial, restaurants, bars, hospitality, university projects. We do it all.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Photo by Cansu on Pexels)

“My personal take on design is driven by my background as a musician. I love jazz, and I am a classically-trained pianist. I like bringing musical ideas and philosophies into our work. I like looking at how discipline and improvisation can come together and drive the architectural process.

“There’s the famous Goethe quote, that you probably know. ‘Architecture is frozen music.’

“Or some has said, ‘Music is melting architecture.’

“It’s fascinating to talk about both. Thelonious Monk also said, ‘talking about music is like dancing about architecture.’

I think the overlaps are very clear, with things like rhythm, ornamentation, measure, beat. For example, the beat in music is like gravity in architecture.

(photo by Konstantin Aal on Unsplash)

“My fascination with jazz is about how jazz is made—improvisationally, impromptu, spontaneous—and whether such ideas can influence the way architecture is made. Architecture is a slower, sometimes tedious process compared to jazz. Architects deal with engineering. We deal with city codes, budgets, client, etc. It can take years, sometimes decades to complete a project.

“What can we learn from jazz? How can we learn from that kind of music—to look at our creative process to find inspiration from one field of study to another?

“In fact, I am the type of artist that doesn’t separate the different fields of studies. I think of it all as one creative force, one endeavor under one artistic umbrella. I like music. I like painting. I like writing. I like architecture. And I don’t separate the four. It is one force moving together at the same time.”

(photo by João Cabral on Pexels)
© Poon Design Inc.