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Los Angeles based architect Michael Maltzan has recently completed the Pittman Dowell Residence. The project is a residence for two artists. Located 15 miles north of Los Angeles at the edge of Angeles National Forest, the site encompasses 6 acres of land originally planned as a hillside subdivision designed by Richard Neutra. Three level pads were created but only one house was built, the 1952 Serulnic Residence. The current owners have over the years developed an extensive desert garden and outdoor pavilion on one of the unbuilt pads. The new residence, to be constructed on the last level pad, is circumscribed by the sole winding road which ends at the Serulnic house.

Five decades after the original house was constructed in this once remote area, the city has grown around it with an accompanying change in both the visual and the physical context. Similarly, the evolving contemporary needs of the artists required a new relationship between building and landscape that is more urban and contained. Inspired by geometric arrangements of interlocking polygons, the new residence takes the form of a heptagonal figure whose purity is confounded by a series of intersecting diagonal slices though the space. Bounded by an introverted exterior, living spaces unfold in a moire of shifting perspectival frames from within and throughout the house. An irregularly shaped void caught within these intersections creates an outdoor room at the center whose edges blur into the adjoining living spaces. In such ways, movement and visual relationships expand and contract to respond to the centrifugal nature of the site and context.

PROJECT: Private Residence

GROSS SQUARE FOOTAGE: 3200 SF

DATE COMPLETED: Entering Construction 2006

ROLE AND SERVICES PROVIDED: Design Architect and Architect of Record, including Concept Design, Design Development, Construction Documents, and Construction Administration

KEY PROJECT STAFF: Michael Maltzan, AIA (Design Principal), Tim Williams (Associate in Charge), Steven Hsun Lee (Project Designer), David Freeland, Hiroshi Tokumaru, Nadine Quirmbach, Wil Carson (Design Team)