Green Medium
project: Vertical Garden Compettion
location: Kings Road House, West Hollywood, CA
date: 2006
scale: Landscape
status: Speculative
design: Ramiro Diaz-Granados & Jason Payne
n 2006 the MAK Center and SCI-Arc co-hosted an invited competition among local design faculty to respond to the then neighboring condominium development just south of the famous Schindler House built in 1922 in West Hollywood, California.
There is no denying that forces larger than those driving the original conception of the Schindler House have overtaken its disposition in the urban landscape. Its low, lateral recline across an uninterrupted horizontal field has been displaced by vertical growth on both sides as Los Angeles swells to meet the housing demands of an increasing population. Further, architecture itself has swollen as it gorges on ever-higher levels of market efficiency at the expense of good form and space. The compressed, highly-charged mass of the Schindler House drowns within the morbid obesity of contemporary urban growth.
Our proposal recognizes the inevitability of the inflation of flows surrounding the House and pulls from them more delicate, deliberate, highly articulated features with which to wrap the House. The building acts as a hardened, refined object that stirs the larger currents at its edges into coherent form and program at its own scale. This peripheral array of features then supports the House anew in the way the original horizontal landscape geometry provided structure for the layout of the interior. Indeed, the walls are simply extensions of the landscape folded into the vertical plane, then lifted at their midsection to allow the House to breathe. The folds thus created bear scalar relation to the nooks, crannies, and crenellations of the building and are filled with plants, water, light, and color. Large enough to flow with the surrounding urbanism yet finely detailed enough to resonate with the morphology of the building, the walls create a soft, greenish medium in which the Schindler House is suspended.