[Span / Planless House]

I'm quite convinced that you can take somebody out of Los Angeles, but you can't extract the L.A. from their soul. That said, I always try to keep tabs on what bubbles up to the surface of one of the most exciting design hubs on the planet. One port of entry into news and happenings in L.A. (outside of Pritzker laureates and P.S.1 winners) is the SPAN blog which chronicles the research and design of Matias del Campo and Sandra Manniger. The pair (from Vienna) is currently on a MAK-Schindler research grant in L.A. where the are investigating algorithmic design with the requisite attention devoted to fabrication and assembly. They just unveiled a recent competition entry entitled the Planless House which seems rather interesting.

The project immediately conjures the spectre of the infamous Endless House by Frederick Kiesler but it is definitely not a retread. The thesis of the project is essentially to "infect" the modernist box with curvilinear geometry and step away from the idea of space making through drawing plans. The implicit strategy is to define space through materiality rather than intended use.

An excerpt from Campos's description of the project:

...the space flows without the interruption of orthogonal walls, instead a seisure, that forms a hidden winter garden, devides the house in two main functional eras: a private space and a semipublic space. Further functions are coded in the material qualities: dense, porous, hot, cold, soft, hard, opaque, glossy, translucent, transparent etc. Some pieces of the house are geometricaly simple, the remains of the orthogonal box, others are complex curved geometries, that need to be panelized in order to build the pieces.

You can read more about the project (and see an additional interior shot) here and learn more about the firm via their website