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4/Way House
Topanga, CA2008 - 2018
“No caveman ever set out to find a two-bedroom cave.” Jeff Kipnis, quoted by Peter Eisenman in House X (FN)
As Thomas Pynchon foretold in The Crying of Lot 49, paranoia now plays an outsized role in defining the habitable landscape of coastal California. In 1992, all of Skyhawk Lane burned, along with 39,000ac of neighboring Topanga and Malibu, reducing all foliage to soot, and property values to half their pre-burn high in the late 1980s. Thus, the 4/WAY House is first an exercise in defensible design, and second a foray into “scopic” architectures of visual choreography — the better to see threats coming. The 2,200sf retreat mediates between competing topography and sight-lines, and between the allure and danger of life in Topanga.
To take advantage of a distant but commanding view of Santa Monica Bay, the house folds across the grain of a steeply sloping ridge, ducking upslope neighbors and cutting into the hillside to cool the lower floor. A fire-proof masonry infrastructure supports a web of trusses clad in standing-seam RhineZinc. Two standard truss profiles in two orientations overlap to form a faceted cascade over studio space and kitchen below, with living space above, creating a “fire blanket” over the structure. Surrounding terraces provide a fire buffer and a complement of outdoor rooms. A carport mandated by the Fire Marshal tilts up to become a projection screen for the upslope living room.
The first germ of the design dates back to a 1988 undergraduate project, “Walden Reconsidered.” A meditation on Laugier’s notion of the Primitive Hut by way of Morphosis’s 2-4-6-8 House (P/A, Bergren 1985), this cubic retreat for one had only an imagined site, somewhere on the Pacific, and barely a hint of program. Its nine-square plan owed a lot to the tic-tac-toe of Louis Kahn’s Trenton Bath House and Peter Eisenman’s turn in House IV. Coop Himmelb(l)au’s Open House and Slow House by Diller + Scofidio, both 1991, suggested other ways to bias the form and orientation of the design in more assertive ways. The gradual staging of a water view in the Slow House, in particular, revealed how a contemporary structure could become a scopic instrument, a revelation that altered both the disposition of this project and my broader ambitions in general. Open House, based on an automatic drawing by Wolf Prix, done with eyes closed, suggests a way of grasping a site as subconscious topology.
4/WAY House is a collage of operations, rather than of parts. The design hinges on a series of rotational moves within a common volume. These turns may be simple or compound, actual or indexical. 4/WAY House reorients a viewer by turns, but without curvature. Its silhouette and overall form depend on a spinning configuration of two truss profiles which echo surrounding slopes and differentiate zones of open-plan interior. These truss rotations enable a diagonal play between internal spaces, the cinematic rapport between the carport and main structure, the framing of major and minor views of surrounding parkland, and a split staging of the civic and coastal horizon.
4/WAY House functions entirely off grid. A 3,000gal well-drawn water supply, 2,760W solar array, and a universal septic system (two 50ft deep cylindrical filtration pits) ensure that the house operates as a standalone structure. Deep south eaves, Title 24-exceeding glazing and insulation, radiant heating, and the pervasive use of recycled or renewable materials such as fly-ash concrete and Baltic birch plywood all mitigate the design’s construction and lifetime energy costs. Perhaps more to the point of “sustainability” in Topanga, the design is engineered to weather earthquakes and fires of apocalyptic proportions. The foundation is a 2ft x 2ft waffle-patterned grade-beam atop 24 caissons. Exterior terracing provides strategic ramparts for firefighters, as well as a landing pattern for medevac access. It is an outpost as much as a home.