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 …

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