Wang Residence - Bass Lake, CA

  I came across Yuja Wang's Vienna Recital while driving back from a summer vacation at Bass Lake. Her vigorous, rhythmically complex, technically exquisite rendition of Philip Glass’s Etude No. 6in particular caught my attention. I started wondering how that kind of energy could infuse the vernacular of Bass Lake architecture. 

I began by modeling a simple A-frame, but detached the sides and lifted it off the ground onto large stone pillars with glass in between, so that the interior space, which often feels heavy and compressed in these structures, instead became light and airy. To make it more interesting, the A-frame was recast as just one part of a larger composition. It's a multi-part design in which the individual functions within the residence take on their own expression, much like how our body parts each have a distinct character related to their purpose, yet are woven together into one harmonious, hierarchical whole.

Each of these "body parts" utilizes computer power to generate and resolve its own distinct form. It takes primary geometric forms and manipulates them through extrusion (sometimes along complex paths), rotation, shifting (along multiple axes), and intersection to invent surprising new spatial forms, then carefully arranges them with purpose. By doing so, the classical rules of architectural composition remain intact - proportion, symmetry, hierarchy, scaling, unity and harmony, contrast, order, clarity, procession, and using materials according to their nature, to name a few. But the end result is something utterly new.

Contemporary architecture in my mind has not really figured out how to utilize the computer to advance it as an art. Using it to scan physical models, as Gehry did, or to play with parametricism as Hadid does, are tangents that I think history will not judge kindly. But computers do open up doors. There is no doubt about that. The question is doors to where.

Soundtrack to project: