“It’s so much at the edge of absolute disaster, yet it has such fantastic poetry”. “It’s either very great or very, very bad”, said Eberhard Zeidler, not quite sure what to think. “It’s not the work of an architect”, complained Paul Rudolph, father of many experimental houses himself. A four-person jury met in New York to deliberate. Spear and Koolhaas submitted the project to Progressive Architecture‘s annual awards program. “I swim every day wherever I am”, he said in a recent interview. Koolhaas is an obsessive swimmer himself. “He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county”, wrote Cheever in his short story “The Swimmer” (1964). ![]() In theory, one could swim (like John Cheever’s heroic swimmer) from the driveway, beneath the house and out to the edge of the bay and beyond. It was about expanding horizons and the mythology of drive-through mobility.Ī lap pool penetrates the right flank of the house and stretches to infinity. ![]() This was not just about sun, water and tropical fecundity. The most incongruous features are two highways that extend orthogonally through either end of the facade. A masonry facade is perforated by the oddly small rabbit hole, or so it appears, and there’s a staircase and narrowly enclosed “street” that branches off into seven mysterious chambers. The house is almost an afterthought, dropped casually between jungle and sea. This was how the first iteration of the Spear House, AKA “Pink House”, at 9325 North Bayshore Drive in Miami Shores, appeared on the cover of Progressive Architecture and made a lasting impression.Įarly studies by Rem Koolhaas and Laurinda Spear (daughter of the clients and still an architecture student at Columbia) reduced the program to essentials: palm tree, lush foliage, beach, egg-yoke sun glued to tissue-paper sky in full-blooded, Endless Summer orange and yellow. It started as a series of rudimentary sketches and collages: the suburban American house deconstructed, re-imagined as a sequence of subverted facades, played out like one of De Chirico’s early cityscapes-”The Melancholy of Departure”, say-in which barrier upon barrier, wall upon wall, has been stretched out and delaminated over time.
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