Marmol Radziner Win Professional Landscape Award
Los Angeles based Marmol Radziner & Associates have won an Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) for their work on the Vienna Way Residence in Venice, California. The jury for the 2009 Professional Awards considered nearly 600 entries from around the world and selected 49 projects for recognition.
Project Statement:
The design of the Vienna Way landscape fully integrates the residence within the surrounding California native landscape. The architecture and landscape were designed to work in unison, creating a seamless transition between the interior and exterior living spaces. The element of water links a “corridor” of exterior spaces—swimming pool, garden roof, riparian planting — and intersects with the interior spaces at the sunken kitchen.
Photography by Joe Fletcher, Steve Gunther, and Jack Coyier.
Project Narrative:
The Vienna Way site is divided into thirds with the architecture massed at the outer edges and the garden spaces in the middle. This spatial organization maximizes the amount of physical and visual open space within a narrow, urban lot.
The exterior spaces are divided into thirds as well by the water “corridor” that literally begins with the swimming pool and is implied by the repeated, mass plantings of Chrondopetalum tectorum (Cape Rush) — a plant naturally found at water edges — which align with the pool and kitchen window in the front garden, continue to the garden roof over the sunken kitchen, and culminate at the rear garden with three California Sycamores. Flanking this riparian “corridor” are drought-tolerant plantings reminiscent of a Chaparral landscape including Quercus agrifolia (Coastal Live Oak), Quercus lobata (Valley Oak), native Muhlenbergia rigens (Deer Grass) and Rhus lancea (African Sumac)
The front garden is designed to be an adult, more mature space with simple, monochromatic, architectural plantings, while the rear garden becomes a place for children’s play. The backyard planting design, which includes a lawn of Buffalo Grass, is more colorful, varied and organically arranged than the front garden. It includes California natives Salvia apiana (White sage), Salvia clevelandii (Cleveland Sage) and Fremontodendron californica (Flannel Bush) as well as a raised vegetable planter.
Due to the large quantity of native California plants and desired size at installation, many were “contract grown” by two local nurseries. All of the trees were field grown and craned into the site. Despite the fact that the organizing element for the garden is water, the plants by and large are drought-tolerant.
Lead Designer: Ron Radziner, FAIA, Affiliate ASLA
Landscape Architect: Meg Rushing Coffee, ASLA
Visit the Marmol Radziner website – here.
Visit the American Society of Landscape Architects website – here.
Alexandre on 11 May 2009 at 5:50 pm #
uau, it’s almost hidden in the vegetation, i like it
Lance on 11 May 2009 at 6:52 pm #
The only words that come to mind are whispering and secret. Amazing!
Terry Glenn Phipps on 12 May 2009 at 4:36 am #
There is a consistent tradition in the best modernist design that suggests an extremely high level of integration between shelter and landscape. Nowhere has this tradition reached higher summits than in the oeuvre of the great California modernists.
The best example that I can think of is to be found in the work of Richard Neutra, the Viennese expatriate who came to understand both the symmetry and symbiosis of the natural world and architecture. These ideas, truly sustainable, saw their birth in the 1920s and 30s and reached their fullest expression in the masterpieces Neutra created for Tremaine and Kaufman (Noguchi also worked on the Tremaine landscape). Eventually Neutra wrote a book called “survival through design” that should be a required text for anyone professing a bent toward sustainability in design.
In my opinion Marmol and Radziner are on the very short list for best practices in the world. This structure clearly demonstrates how the architects have fully imbibed an understanding of the context in which they are building.
In the Vienna way residence the architecture and landscape are inseparable and equal protagonists of the dialog between dweller and landscape. The subtle layering and use of structure as delineation of exterior space extends the livable area into a series of private outdoor rooms just as sheltering as those covered by roof.
On first seeing this project some time ago I was puzzled by the color choice. Then it occurred to me that this metaphorically erases the structure leaving only the gardens to flow through open window walls into the interior spaces.
It is very interesting to me to juxtapose this work and other, seemingly comparable, attempts to blur the distinction between indoors and out. In psychological terms glass is often viewed as an archetype of impotence. Thinking of buildings such as Mies’ glass house for Farnsworth or Philip Johnson’s glass house it is possible to interpret a very clear statement about man and nature. Both buildings, and especially Farnsworth raised off the ground on columns, demonstrate the impulse to exert supremacy and control over nature. The glass walls render the garden impotent to enter and occupant immune to the environment. Philip Johnson famously described his building as feeling like a “giant elevator” as the snow falls past the bright exterior lighting. This is architecture rising above nature.
In the Vienna Way house, as with the architecture of Neutra, the concept of shelter is, conversely, reduced to its minimal necessary components and the landscape is invited to pervade the interior and erase the boundaries between inside and out. This is a different architecture of space that flows away from the viewer and into sometimes grand and sometimes intimate angles of nature or building. Division, when required, renders the potentially hostile world psychologically impotent merely by closing a series of sliding glass panels.
Marmol and Radziner’s work belongs in the canon of great world architecture and illuminates a clear path for the future (and ironically also the past) of the deluxe suburban villa. The beauty of this vision of Southern California architecture is not to be found in the explosive deconstruction of form but rather in the poetic and healthy dematerialization of barriers.
Terry Glenn Phipps
Paul Albright on 12 May 2009 at 8:26 am #
Imperessive landscape! The Buffalo Grass is a week choice however – a Cailornia native Grass would have fit the the project’s intent and prove far more sustainable.
Connie on 12 May 2009 at 12:05 pm #
Terry Glenn Phipps wrote: “Both buildings, and especially Farnsworth raised off the ground on columns, demonstrate the impulse to exert supremacy and control over nature. The glass walls render the garden impotent to enter and occupant immune to the environment.”
Farnsworth (which is my favorite private residence ever) has been flooded how many times over the last decade? Very little control over nature there, unfortunately.
But I have to agree, Marmol and Radziner’s portfolio is amazing. Now I only have to win the lottery …
rob on 17 May 2009 at 2:41 pm #
it is amazing and it looks very peaceful