Here is a real project, a home for a couple and their three children. The couple subscribed to the Edgar Cayce cosmology, which provided the semiotic currency. They dearly sought a deal on construction costs, and were happy to have part of the cost underwritten. They had a complex program: the forms of the house overall in the shared spaces were to represent aspirations of the family as a whole, but each child was to have a bedroom space engineered to the genetics of their mind. (The parent’s bedroom was supposed to be “normal.”) And incidentally, the home was a passive solar design with lots of interior masonry to act as heat storage. The public space was defined by a complex form that approached from the (geologically exact) north as a ceiling beam, them developed a spoon-shape dome. The dome was painted in an iconic manner by a local intuitive to reflect the character of the family (the icons drawn from the Rider Waite Smith Tarot). The dome then spread into a seven-forked glass transom with a brick wall bottom. This assembly separated the living room from the sun-room (which is also the solar space). In the glass transom are seven large stained glass panels arranged spectrally. As a matter of note, substantial effort went into the selection of these panels: most are flashed (meaning two or more layers of glass) and each is from a different European city (famous for that color) using indigenous minerals. As a conceit, we chose the cities to roughly represent the constellation associated with the astrological sign the family adopted. The spoon-dome-glass assembly is molded in curved wood. The brick wall is serpentine, wrapping from the far west (where it terminates in shelves that define a music area), across the south (where it defines the sun room/solar collector), to the southeast (where it defines the entrance foyer and the kitchen), and the east where it opens to the hallway to the children’s wing. The wall ends in an elaborate enclosure for the wood stove. This wall of course curls in plan. It has arches in the curved sections, which is unusual. And the main arch -- right under the “spoon/dome” -- has a reverse arch. That is the shape is more like an upside down W than an upside down U, and it is as if the dome has pushed the top if the arch down. This suspended keystone is the anchor for all the formal references in the space. The form of the wall in plan is a Bessell function of an isotropic line in the five-body problem where the mass of the bodies is determined by the “concept binding” metric of each. The dynamism in three of the bodies assumed the desired evolution, beyond that of the parents. The residents were monitored, and the desired effects were noted. But after a few years, the husband (a personal injury lawyer) dealt unfairly with the designer in an unrelated matter. The next day, the keystone fell. The family moved out shortly thereafter; the structure is now owned by the federal government. Back to the house: each child had their own specific profile and set of formal relationships. All three bedrooms shared the same physically contiguous space in the clerestories, so that sound would flow among rooms. (This also supported the solar heat distribution system, which isn’t detailed here.) The older daughter had strictly two dimensional forces. The novelty of this space was the inferred effect on the inside of the pronounced form of the outside. The younger daughter had a more developed profile; full three dimensional flows were used, but with closed topology. There is a door to the outside, but otherwise the inside/outside definition is strict. The photo shows how the “cave” was sculpted and surfaced with curved wood. The surface is anticubic (octahedral) in its poles, and a minimal surface otherwise. The son’s room is a folded Schoen surface, which is to say the same surface is inside and outside. The room is in two halves, one the inside-out of the other. In the sister’s “cave.” the form was tensile, but with inner pressure. the tensile form here is neutral, in fact defined by nylon strings (then epoxied veneers). This space is fairly radical in terms of cognitive chiropractic. It apparently failed to produce a world-class introspective abstraction capability (the boy was an aspiring musician), and this may be attributable to its out-of-bounds use of five-fold symmetry.
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