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Silverlake MT
Los Angeles, CA2000 - 2003
As Dayware was taking shape, Deegan-Day Design completed a number of small residential projects, mostly renovations and additions. These, along with a year’s experience in airport design at HNTB, the largest U.S. aviation firm at the time, were foreground to the Silverlake House, completed in 2002. Built in 1947, the original home was a mid-century “tract moderne.” It enjoyed a commanding stance facing west toward Griffith Park, but little visual or spatial outreach toward those views or its immediate surroundings. Our expansion and reconfiguration of the existing house reoriented the original out toward its landscape and the city.
Like Rudolph Schindler’s Oliver House down the street, the residence now rotates as it escalates up its site, opening a series of diagonally framed views to the northwest. Interior spaces nest into one another and layer to blur the divide between collective and personal space. Advanced materials, including aviation decking and paneling, allowed a wide variety of lightweight and translucent surface explorations. Where possible, stock industrial parts and hardware were employed (aluminum bleacher seats, restaurant matting, etc.), but extensive custom, quasi-industrial design tailors parts into a more finished whole.
Echoing the bipartite layering of the nearby Griffith Observatory, where a metallic superstructure hovers over masonry ramparts, the Silverlake addition blurs the division between public signification and privatized domesticity, an effect compounded by technologies of reception and transmission that reach beyond its local context. Decks, patios and gardens complement each interior space so that most rooms now spill into one another and to the outdoors.