A sleepwalking woman stands by the railing and gazes out to sea. The house rises out of a cornflower-blue bay, a dreamy scaffolding, planar with square, punched-out openings and backlit screens, as in Kabuki theater. In one drawing, there’s a shooting star and a sliver of moon glowing in the night sky. Spear’s renderings for the revised version combine the moody romanticism of Chagall with the hippy innocence of Alicia Bay Laurel’s Living on the Earth. (By then, Koolhaas had returned to Europe to finish work on Delirious New York, his “retroactive manifesto”, and launch the Office for Modern Architecture ). They rejected the plan, seeing it more as a philosophical proposition than a place to live and encouraged their daughter to try again.Īfter completing her studies at Columbia University, Laurinda reworked the plan with newfound partner and husband, Bernardo Fort-Brescia. Meanwhile, back in Miami, clients Harold and Suzanne Spear were getting more and more anxious. Despite dissension, the Spear-Koolhaas proposal was awarded a first-place citation and featured in the January 1975 issue of the magazine. Even Rudolph acknowledged that it had a certain “surrealistic quality… a kind of power that was inexplicable”. Peter Eisenman (Koolhaas’s friend and mentor at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies) praised it for being a “kind of utopistic gesture in the midst of this awful middle-class suburbia”. Ivan Chermayeff found it “undeveloped” as a building, but successful as a “poetic diagram”, as if a “mad poet has stretched it out taken the drawings and laid them down like a child’s cutouts.”Īll agreed that it was urban, enigmatic and conceptually rich, with multiple layers of meaning. “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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