One story midcentury residence located in Hollywood Hills by Struere

Architects: Struere
Location: Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA
Year: 2015
Area: 1.200 ft²/ 111 m²
Photo courtesy: Jeff Ong
Description:

“This is a small house designed for outdoor living, with Living Spaces that engage the Garden, blurring the boundary between Exterior and Interior, and engaging the ground surrounding it and opening to the sky.

This House affirms the vibrancy of the design strategies of the modern houses of Los Angeles. What is new is that now we can build in a truly sustainable way, with cool roofs, dual glazed low iron crystal clear glazing expanses, new structural steel codes and advances in engineering that allow for even thinner overhanging roofs, thick slumped stone walls can be replaced with patterned walls with more efficient insulation and usable cavities.

Reenergizing and renewing the Modern Living Promise, the new House opens the interiors to the outdoors and the views: it’s an Open House, engaged with its garden, exterior spaces and the interiors merge in an attempt to bring us together again with our natural surroundings.

The Contemporary design echoes mid-20th Century horizontal lines (the famous ‘planes of Id’) that refer to the endless Los Angeles Horizon (only if interrupted by the vertical plane where the SmartTV screen is embedded). Thus this small house makes attempts to critically engage the urbanity of the the city it belongs to.

The House is a composition of horizontal volumes and a void interpreted as a garden anchored by a tree. The House is Split into two volumes perpendicular to each other, with a small court in between. A Specimen Tree is the centerpiece of this court, growing through the roof joining the two volumes of the house, growing through a rectangular Oculus, and soaring towards the sky.

The volumetric composition of the House is brought together by the continuous Roof/canopy (=Horizon). Thus the House defines Los Angeles as a city made of volumetric fragments and voids coalesced by the endless horizon. This House reflects the urban condition of Los Angeles: an endless Horizon that paradoxically brings together the divergent geometries of Los Angeles’ urban sprawl.”